Title: The Road to Wigan Pier
Author: George Orwell
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Language: English
Date first posted: June 2002
Date most recently updated: May 2012
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Title: The Road to Wigan Pier
Author: George Orwell
PART ONE
1
The first sound in the mornings was the clumping of the mill-girls' clogs
down the cobbled street. Earlier than that, I suppose, there were factory
whistles which I was never awake to hear.
There were generally four of us in the bedroom, and a beastly place it
was, with that defiled impermanent look of rooms that are not serving
their rightful purpose. Years earlier the house had been an ordinary
dwelling-house, and when the Brookers had taken it and fitted it out as
a tripe-shop and lodging-house, they had inherited some of the more
useless pieces of furniture and had never had the energy to remove them.
We were therefore sleeping in what was still recognizably a
drawing-room. Hanging from the ceiling there was a heavy glass
chandelier on which the dust was so thick that it was like fur. And
covering most of one wall there was a huge hideous piece of junk,
something between a sideboard and a hall-stand, with lots of carving and
little drawers and strips of looking-glass, and there was a once-gaudy
carpet ringed by the slop-pails of years, and two gilt chairs with burst
seats, and one of those old-fashioned horsehair armchairs which you
slide off when you try to sit on them. The room had been turned into a
bedroom by thrusting four squalid beds in among this other wreckage.
My bed was in the right-hand corner on the side nearest the door. There
was another bed across the foot of it and jammed hard against it (it had
to be in that position to allow the door to open) so that I had to sleep
with my legs doubled up; if I straightened them out I kicked the
occupant of the other bed in the small of the back. He was an elderly
man named Mr Reilly, a mechanic of sorts and employed 'on top' at one of
the coal pits. Luckily he had to go to work at five in the morning, so I
could uncoil my legs and have a couple of hours' proper sleep after he
was gone. In the bed opposite there was a Scotch miner who had been
injured in a pit accident (a huge chunk of stone pinned him to the
ground and it was a couple of hours before they could lever it off), and
had received five hundred pounds compensation. He was a big handsome man
of forty, with grizzled hair and a clipped moustache, more like a
sergeant-major than a miner, and he would lie in bed till late in the
day, smoking a short pipe. The other bed was occupied by a succession of
commercial travellers, newspaper-canvassers, and hire-purchase touts who
generally stayed for a couple of nights. It was a double bed and much
the best in the room. I had slept in it myself my first night there, but
had been manoeuvred out of it to make room for another lodger. I believe
all newcomers spent their first night in the double bed, which was used,
so to speak, as bait. All the windows were kept tight shut, with a red
sandbag jammed in the bottom, and in the morning the room stank like a
ferret's cage. You did not notice it when you got up, but if you went
out of the room and came back, the smell hit you in the face with a
smack.
I never discovered how many bedrooms the house contained, but strange to
say there was a bathroom, dating from before the Brookers' time.
Downstairs there was the usual kitchen living-room with its huge open
range burning night and day. It was lighted only by a skylight, for on
one side of it was the shop and on the other the larder, which opened
into some dark subterranean place where the tripe was stored. Partly
blocking the door of the larder there was a shapeless sofa upon which
Mrs Brooker, our landlady, lay permanently ill, festooned in grimy
blankets. She had a big, pale yellow, anxious face. No one knew for
certain what was the matter with her; I suspect that her only real
trouble was over-eating. In front of the fire there was almost always a
line of damp washing, and in the middle of the room was the big kitchen
table at which the family and all the lodgers ate. I never saw this
table completely uncovered, but I saw its various wrappings at different
times. At the bottom there was a layer of old newspaper stained by
Worcester Sauce; above that a sheet of sticky white oil-cloth; above
that a green serge cloth; above that a coarse linen cloth, never changed
and seldom taken off. Generally the crumbs from breakfast were still on
the table at supper. I used to get to know individual crumbs by sight
and watch their progress up and down the table from day to day.
The shop was a narrow, cold sort of room. On the outside of the window
a few white letters, relics of ancient chocolate advertisements, were
scattered like stars. Inside there was a slab upon which lay the great
white folds of tripe, and the grey flocculent stuff known as 'black
tripe', and the ghostly translucent feet of pigs, ready boiled. It was
the ordinary 'tripe and pea' shop, and not much else was stocked except
bread, cigarettes, and tinned stuff. 'Teas' were advertised in the
window, but if a customer demanded a cup of tea he was usually put off
with excuses. Mr Brooker, though out of work for two years, was a miner
by trade, but he and his wife had been keeping shops of various kinds as
a side-line all their lives. At one time they had had a pub, but they
had lost their licence for allowing gambling on the premises. I doubt
whether any of their businesses had ever paid; they were the kind of
people who run a business chiefly in order to have something to grumble
about. Mr Brooker was a dark, small-boned, sour, Irish-looking man, and
astonishingly dirty. I don't think I ever once saw his hands clean. As
Mrs Brooker was now an invalid he prepared most of the food, and like
all people with permanently dirty hands he had a peculiarly intimate,
lingering manner of handling things. If he gave you a slice of
bread-and-butter there was always a black thumb-print on it. Even in the
early morning when he descended into the mysterious den behind Mrs
Brooker's sofa and fished out the tripe, his hands were already black. I
heard dreadful stories from the other lodgers about the place where the
tripe was kept. Blackbeetles were said to swarm there. I do not know how
often fresh consignments of tripe were ordered, but it was at long
intervals, for Mrs Brooker used to date events by it. 'Let me see now,
I've had in three lots of froze (frozen tripe) since that happened,'
etc. We lodgers were never given tripe to eat. At the time I imagined
that this was because tripe was too expensive; I have since thought that
it was merely because we knew too much about it. The Brookers never ate
tripe themselves, I noticed.
The only permanent lodgers were the Scotch miner, Mr Reilly, two old-age
pensioners, and an unemployed man on the P.A.C. named Joe--he was the
kind of person who has no surname. The Scotch miner was a bore when you
got to know him. Like so many unemployed men he spent too much time
reading newspapers, and if you did not head him off he would discourse
for hours about such things as the Yellow Peril, trunk murders,
astrology, and the conflict between religion and science. The old-age
pensioners had, as usual, been driven from their homes by the Means
Test. They handed their weekly ten shillings over to the Brookers and in
return got the kind of accommodation you would expect for ten shillings;
that is, a bed in the attic and meals chiefly of bread-and-butter. One
of them was of 'superior' type and was dying of some malignant
disease--cancer, I believe. He only got out of bed on the days when he
went to draw his pension. The other, called by everyone Old Jack, was an
ex-miner aged seventy-eight who had worked well over fifty years in the
pits. He was alert and intelligent, but curiously enough he seemed only
to remember his boyhood experiences and to have forgotten all about the
modern mining machinery and improvements. He used to tell me tales of
fights with savage horses in the narrow galleries underground. When he
heard that I was arranging to go down several coal mines he was
contemptuous and declared that a man of my size (six feet two and a
half) would never manage the 'travelling'; it was no use telling him
that the 'travelling' was better than it used to be. But he was friendly
to everyone and used to give us all a fine shout of 'Good night, boys!'
as he crawled up the stairs to his bed somewhere under the rafters. What
I most admired about Old Jack was that he never cadged; he was generally
out-of tobacco towards the end of the week, but he always refused to
smoke anyone else's. The Brookers had insured the lives of both old-age
pensioners with one of the tanner-a-week companies. It was said that
they were overheard anxiously asking the insurance-tout 'how long people
lives when they've got cancer'.
Joe, like the Scotchman, was a great reader of newspapers and spent
almost his entire day in the public library. He was the typical
unmarried unemployed man, a derelict-looking, frankly ragged creature
with a round, almost childish face on which there was a naively naughty
expression. He looked more like a neglected little boy than a grown-up
man. I suppose it is the complete lack of responsibility that makes so
many of these men look younger than their ages. From Joe's appearance I
took him to be about twenty-eight, and was amazed to learn that he was
forty-three. He had a love of resounding phrases and was very proud of
the astuteness with which he had avoided getting married. He often said
to me, 'Matrimonial chains is a big item,' evidently feeling this to be
a very subtle and portentous remark. His total income was fifteen
shillings a week, and he paid out six or seven to the Brookers for his
bed. I sometimes used to see him making himself a cup of tea over the
kitchen fire, but for the rest he got his meals somewhere out of doors;
it was mostly slices of bread-and-marg and packets of fish and chips, I
suppose.
Besides these there was a floating clientele of commercial travellers of
the poorer sort, travelling actors--always common in the North because
most of the larger pubs hire variety artists at the week-ends--and
newspaper-canvassers. The newspaper-canvassers were a type I had never
met before. Their job seemed to me so hopeless, so appalling that I
wondered how anyone could put up with such a thing when prison was a
possible alternative. They were employed mostly by weekly or Sunday
papers, and they were sent from town to town, provided with maps and
given a list of streets which they had to 'work' each day. If they
failed to secure a minimum of twenty orders a day, they got the sack. So
long as they kept up their twenty orders a day they received a small
salary--two pounds a week, I think; on any order over the twenty they
drew a tiny commission. The thing is not so impossible as it sounds,
because in working-class districts every family takes in a twopenny
weekly paper and changes it every few weeks; but I doubt whether anyone
keeps a job of that kind long. The newspapers engage poor desperate
wretches, out-of-work clerks and commercial travellers and the like, who
for a while make frantic efforts and keep their sales up to the minimum;
then as the deadly work wears them down they are sacked and fresh men
are taken on. I got to know two who were employed by one of the more
notorious weeklies. Both of them were middle-aged men with families to
support, and one of them was a grandfather. They were on their feet ten
hours a day, 'working' their appointed streets, and then busy late into
the night filling in blank forms for some swindle their paper was
running--one of those schemes by which you are 'given' a set of crockery
if you take out a six weeks' subscription and send a two-shilling postal
order as well. The fat one, the grandfather, used to fall asleep with
his head on a pile of forms. Neither of them could afford the pound a
week which the Brookers charged for full board. They used to pay a small
sum for their beds and make shamefaced meals in a corner of the kitchen
off bacon and bread-and-margarine which they stored in their
suit-cases.
The Brookers had large numbers of sons and daughters, most of whom had
long since fled from home. Some were in Canada 'at Canada', as Mrs
Brooker used to put it. There was only one son living near by, a large
pig-like young man employed in a garage, who frequently came to the
house for his meals. His wife was there all day with the two children,
and most of the cooking and laundering was done by her and by Emmie, the
fiancee of another son who was in London. Emmie was a fair-haired,
sharp-nosed, unhappy-looking girl who worked at one of the mills for
some starvation wage, but nevertheless spent all her evenings in bondage
at the Brookers' house. I gathered that the marriage was constantly
being postponed and would probably never take place, but Mrs Brooker had
already appropriated Emmie as a daughter-in-law, and nagged her in that
peculiar watchful, loving way that invalids have. The rest of the
housework was done, or not done, by Mr Brooker. Mrs Brooker seldom rose
from her sofa in the kitchen (she spent the night there as well as the
day) and was too ill to do anything except eat stupendous meals. It was
Mr Brooker who attended to the shop, gave the lodgers their food, and
'did out' the bedrooms. He was always moving with incredible slowness
from one hated job to another. Often the beds were still unmade at six
in the evening, and at any hour of the day you were liable to meet Mr
Brooker on the stairs, carrying a full chamber-pot which he gripped with
his thumb well over the rim. In the mornings he sat by the fire with a
tub of filthy water, peeling potatoes at the speed of a slow-motion
picture. I never saw anyone who could peel potatoes with quite such an
air of brooding resentment. You could see the hatred of this 'bloody
woman's work', as he called it, fermenting inside him, a kind of bitter
juice. He was one of those people who can chew their grievances like a
cud.
Of course, as I was indoors a good deal, I heard all about the Brookers'
woes, and how everyone swindled them and was ungrateful to them, and how
the shop did not pay and the lodging-house hardly paid. By local
standards they were not so badly off, for, in some way I did not
understand, Mr Brooker was dodging the Means Test and drawing an
allowance from the P.A.C., but their chief pleasure was talking about
their grievances to anyone who would listen. Mrs Brooker used to lament
by the hour, lying on her sofa, a soft mound of fat and self-pity,
saying the same things over and over again.' We don't seem to get no
customers nowadays. I don't know 'ow it is. The tripe's just a-laying
there day after day--such beautiful tripe it is, too! It does seem 'ard,
don't it now?' etc., etc., etc. All Mrs Brookers' laments ended with'
It does seem 'ard, don't it now?' like the refrain of a ballade.
Certainly it was true that the shop did not pay. The whole place had the
unmistakable dusty, flyblown air of a business that is going down. But
it would have been quite useless to explain to them _why_ nobody came to
the shop, even if one had had the face to do it; neither was capable of
understanding that last year's dead bluebottles supine in the shop
window are not good for trade.
But the thing that really tormented them was the thought of those two
old-age pensioners living in their house, usurping floor-space,
devouring food, and paying only ten shillings a week. I doubt whether
they were really losing money over the old-age pensioners, though
certainly the profit on ten shillings a week must have been very small.
But in their eyes the two old men were a kind of dreadful parasite who
had fastened on them and were living on their charity. Old Jack they
could just tolerate, because he kept out-of-doors most of the day, but
they really hated the bedridden one, Hooker by name. Mr Brooker had a
queer way of pronouncing his name, without the H and with a long
U--'Uker'. What tales I heard about old Hooker and his fractiousness,
the nuisance of making his bed, the way he 'wouldn't eat' this and
'wouldn't eat' that, his endless ingratitude and, above all, the selfish
obstinacy with which he refused to die! The Brookers were quite openly
pining for him to die. When that happened they could at least draw the
insurance money. They seemed to feel him there, eating their substance
day after day, as though he had been a living worm in their bowels.
Sometimes Mr Brooker would look up from his potato-peeling, catch my
eye, and jerk his head with a look of inexpressible bitterness towards
the ceiling, towards old Hooker's room. 'It's a b-, ain't it?' he would
say. There was no need to say more; I had heard all about old Hooker's
ways already. But the Brookers had grievances of one kind and another
against all their lodgers, myself included, no doubt. Joe, being on the
P.A.C., was practically in the same category as the old-age pensioners.
The Scotchman paid a pound a week, but he was indoors most of the day
and they 'didn't like him always hanging round the place', as they put
it. The newspaper-canvassers were out all day, but the Brookers bore
them a grudge for bringing in their own food, and even Mr Reilly, their
best lodger, was in disgrace because Mrs Brooker said that he woke her
up when he came downstairs in the mornings. They couldn't, they
complained perpetually, get the kind of lodgers they wanted--good-class
'commercial gentlemen' who paid full board and were out all day. Their
ideal lodger would have been somebody who paid thirty shillings a week
and never came indoors except to sleep. I have noticed that people who
let lodgings nearly always hate their lodgers. They want their money but
they look on them as intruders and have a curiously watchful, jealous
attitude which at bottom is a determination not to let the lodger make
himself too much at home. It is an inevitable result of the bad system
by which the lodger has to live in somebody else's house without being
one of the family.
The meals at the Brookers' house were uniformly disgusting. For
breakfast you got two rashers of bacon and a pale fried egg, and
bread-and-butter which had often been cut overnight and always had
thumb-marks on it. However tactfully I tried, I could never induce Mr
Brooker to let me cut my own bread-and-butter; he _would_ hand it to me
slice by slice, each slice gripped firmly under that broad black thumbs
For dinner there were generally those threepenny steak puddings which
are sold ready-made in tins--these were part of the stock of the shop, I
think--and boiled potatoes and rice pudding. For tea there was more
bread-and-butter and frayed-looking sweet cakes which were probably
bought as 'stales' from the baker. For supper there was the pale flabby
Lancashire cheese and biscuits. The Brookers never called these biscuits
biscuits. They always referred to them reverently as 'cream
crackers'--'Have another cream cracker, Mr Reilly. You'll like a cream
cracker with your cheese'--thus glozing over the fact that there was
only cheese for supper. Several bottles of Worcester Sauce and a
half-full jar of marmalade lived permanently on the table. It was usual
to souse everything, even a piece of cheese, with Worcester Sauce, but I
never saw anyone brave the marmalade jar, which was an unspeakable mass
of stickiness and dust. Mrs Brooker had her meals separately but also
took snacks from any meal that happened to be going, and manoeuvred with
great skill for what she called 'the bottom of the pot', meaning the
strongest cup of tea. She had a habit of constantly wiping her mouth on
one of her blankets. Towards the end of my stay she took to tearing off
strips of newspaper for this purpose, and in the morning the floor was
often littered with crumpled-up balls of slimy paper which lay there for
hours. The smell of the kitchen was dreadful, but, as with that of the
bedroom, you ceased to notice it after a while.
It struck me that this place must be fairly normal as lodging-houses in
the industrial areas go, for on the whole the lodgers did not complain.
The only one who ever did so to my knowledge was a little black-haired,
sharp-nosed Cockney, a traveller for a cigarette firm. He had never been
in the North before, and I think that till recently he had been in
better employ and was used to staying in commercial hotels. This was his
first glimpse of really low-class lodgings, the kind of place in which
the poor tribe of touts and canvassers have to shelter upon their
endless journeys. In the morning as we were dressing (he had slept in
the double bed, of course) I saw him look round the desolate room with a
sort of wondering aversion. He caught my eye and suddenly divined that I
was a fellow-Southerner. 'The filthy bloody bastards!' he said
feelingly. After that he packed his suit-case, went downstairs and, with
great strength of mind, told the Brookers that this was not the kind of
house he was accustomed to and that he was leaving immediately. The
Brookers could never understand why. They were astonished and hurt. The
ingratitude of it! Leaving them like that for no reason after a single
night! Afterwards they discussed it over and over again, in all its
bearings. It was added to their store of grievances.
On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I
decided to leave. The place was beginning to depress me. It was not only
the dirt, the smells, and the vile food, but the feeling of stagnant
meaningless decay, of having got down into some subterranean place where
people go creeping round and round, just like blackbeetles, in an
endless muddle of slovened jobs and mean grievances. The most dreadful
thing about people like the Brookers is the way they say the same things
over and over again. It gives you the feeling that they are not real
people at all, but a kind of ghost for ever rehearsing the same futile
rigmarole. In the end Mrs Brooker's self-pitying talk--always the same
complaints, over and over, and always ending with the tremulous whine of
'It does seem 'ard, don't it now?'--revolted me even more than her habit
of wiping her mouth with bits of newspaper. But it is no use saying that
people like the Brookers are just disgusting and trying to put them out
of mind. For they exist in tens and hundreds of thousands; they are one
of the characteristic by-products of the modern world. You cannot
disregard them if you accept the civilization that produced them. For
this is part at least of what industrialism has done for us. Columbus
sailed the Atlantic, the first steam engines tottered into motion, the
British squares stood firm under the French guns at Waterloo, the
one-eyed scoundrels of the nineteenth century praised God and filled
their pockets; and this is where it all led--to labyrinthine slums and
dark back kitchens with sickly, ageing people creeping round and round
them like blackbeetles. It is a kind of duty to see and smell such
places now and again, especially smell them, lest you should forget that
they exist; though perhaps it is better not to stay there too long.
The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps,
chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud
criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather
had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened
snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row
after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to
the-embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was
kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which
ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to
see everything about her--her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms
reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was
almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the
usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks
forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second
in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have
ever-seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that' It
isn't the same for them as it would be for us,' and that people bred in
the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face
was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what
was happening to her--understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny
it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a
slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.
But quite soon the train drew away into open country, and that seemed
strange, almost unnatural, as though the open country had been a kind of
park; for in the industrial areas one always feels that the smoke and
filth must go on for ever and that no part of the earth's surface can
escape them. In a crowded, dirty little country like ours one takes
defilement almost for granted. Slag-heaps and chimneys seem a more
normal, probable landscape than grass and trees, and even in the depths
of the country when you drive your fork into the ground you half expect
to lever up a broken bottle or a rusty can. But out here the snow was
untrodden and lay so deep that only the tops of the stone boundary-walls
were showing, winding over the hills like black paths. I remembered that
D. H. Lawrence, writing of this same landscape or another near by, said
that the snow-covered hills rippled away into the distance 'like
muscle'. It was not the simile that would have occurred to me. To my eye
the snow and the black walls were more like a white dress with black
piping running across it.
Although the snow was hardly broken the sun was shining brightly, and
behind the shut windows of the carriage it seemed warm. According to the
almanac this was spring, and a few of the birds seemed to believe it.
For the first time in my life, in a bare patch beside the line, I saw
rooks treading. They did it on the ground and not, as I should have
expected, in a tree. The manner of courtship was curious. The female
stood with her beak open and the male walked round her and appeared to
be feeding her. I had hardly been in the train half an hour, but it
seemed a very long way from the Brookers' back-kitchen to the empty
slopes of snow, the bright sunshine, and the big gleaming birds.
The whole of the industrial districts are really one enormous town, of
about the same population as Greater London but, fortunately, of much
larger area; so that even in the middle of them there is still room for
patches of cleanness and decency. That is an encouraging thought. In
spite of hard trying, man has not yet succeeded in doing his dirt
everywhere. The earth is so vast and still so empty that even in the
filthy heart of civilization you find fields where the grass is green
instead of grey; perhaps if you looked for them you might even find
streams with live fish in them instead of salmon tins. For quite a long
time, perhaps another twenty minutes, the train was rolling through open
country before the villa-civilization began to close in upon us again,
and then the outer slums, and then the slag-heaps, belching chimneys,
blast-furnaces, canals, and gaso-meters of another industrial town.
2
Our civilization, _pace_ Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely
than one realizes until one stops to think about it. The machines that
keep us alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or
indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world
the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the
soil. He is a sort of caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything
that is not grimy is supported. For this reason the actual process by
which coal is extracted is well worth watching, if you get the chance
and are willing to take the trouble.
When you go down a coal-mine it is important to try and get to the coal
face when the 'fillers' are at work. This is not easy, because when the
mine is working visitors are a nuisance and are not encouraged, but if
you go at any other time, it is possible to come away with a totally
wrong impression. On a Sunday, for instance, a mine seems almost
peaceful. The time to go there is when the machines are roaring and the
air is black with coal dust, and when you can actually see what the
miners have to do. At those times the place is like hell, or at any rate
like my own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one imagines in
hell are if there--heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and,
above all, unbearably cramped space. Everything except the fire, for
there is no fire down there except the feeble beams of Davy lamps and
electric torches which scarcely penetrate the clouds of coal dust.
When you have finally got there--and getting there is a in itself: I
will explain that in a moment--you crawl through the last line of pit
props and see opposite you a shiny black wall three or four feet high.
This is the coal face. Overhead is the smooth ceiling made by the rock
from which the coal has been cut; underneath is the rock again, so that
the gallery you are in is only as high as the ledge of coal itself,
probably not much more than a yard. The first impression of all,
overmastering everything else for a while, is the frightful, deafening
din from the conveyor belt which carries the coal away. You cannot see
very far, because the fog of coal dust throws back the beam of your
lamp, but you can see on either side of you the line of half-naked
kneeling men, one to every four or five yards, driving their shovels
under the fallen coal and flinging it swiftly over their left shoulders.
They are feeding it on to the conveyor belt, a moving rubber, belt a
couple of feet wide which runs a yard or two behind them. Down this belt
a glittering river of coal races constantly. In a big mine it is
carrying away several tons of coal every minute. It bears it off to some
place in the main roads where it is shot into tubs holding half a ton,
and thence dragged to the cages and hoisted to the outer air.
It is impossible to watch the 'fillers' at work without feeling a pang
of envy for their toughness. It is a dreadful job that they do, an
almost superhuman job by the standard of an ordinary person. For they
are not only shifting monstrous quantities of coal, they are also doing,
it in a position that doubles or trebles the work. They have got to
remain kneeling all the while--they could hardly rise from their knees
without hitting the ceiling--and you can easily see by trying it what a
tremendous effort this means. Shovelling is comparatively easy when you
are standing up, because you can use your knee and thigh to drive the
shovel along; kneeling down, the whole of the strain is thrown upon your
arm and belly muscles. And the other conditions do not exactly make
things easier. There is the heat--it varies, but in some mines it is
suffocating--and the coal dust that stuffs up your throat and nostrils
and collects along your eyelids, and the unending rattle of the conveyor
belt, which in that confined space is rather like the rattle of a
machine gun. But the fillers look and work as though they were made of
iron. They really do look like iron hammered iron statues--under the
smooth coat of coal dust which clings to them from head to foot. It is
only when you see miners down the mine and naked that you realize what
splendid men, they are. Most of them are small (big men are at a
disadvantage in that job) but nearly all of them have the most noble
bodies; wide shoulders tapering to slender supple waists, and small
pronounced buttocks and sinewy thighs, with not an ounce of waste flesh
anywhere. In the hotter mines they wear only a pair of thin drawers,
clogs and knee-pads; in the hottest mines of all, only the clogs and
knee-pads. You can hardly tell by the look of them whether they are
young or old. They may be any age up to sixty or even sixty-five, but
when they are black and naked they all look alike. No one could do their
work who had not a young man's body, and a figure fit for a guardsman at
that, just a few pounds of extra flesh on the waist-line, and the
constant bending would be impossible. You can never forget that
spectacle once you have seen it--the line of bowed, kneeling figures,
sooty black all over, driving their, huge shovels under the coal with
stupendous force and speed. They are on the job for seven and a half
hours, theoretically without a break, for there is no time 'off'.
Actually they, snatch a quarter of an hour or so at some time during the
shift to eat the food they have brought with them, usually a hunk of
bread and dripping and a bottle of cold tea. The first time I was
watching the 'fillers' at work I put my hand upon some dreadful slimy
thing among the coal dust. It was a chewed quid of tobacco. Nearly all
the miners chew tobacco, which is said to be good against thirst.
Probably you have to go down several coal-mines before you can get much
grasp of the processes that are going on round you. This is chiefly
because the mere effort of getting from place to place; makes it
difficult to notice anything else, In some ways it is even
disappointing, or at least is unlike what you have, expected. You get
into the cage, which is a steel box about as wide as a telephone box and
two or three times as long. It holds ten men, but they pack it like
pilchards in a tin, and a tall man cannot stand upright in it. The steel
door shuts upon you, and somebody working the winding gear above drops
you into the void. You have the usual momentary qualm in your belly and
a bursting sensation in the cars, but not much sensation of movement
till you get near the bottom, when the cage slows down so abruptly that
you could swear it is going upwards again. In the middle of the run the
cage probably touches sixty miles an hour; in some of the deeper mines
it touches even more. When you crawl out at the bottom you are perhaps
four hundred yards underground. That is to say you have a
tolerable-sized mountain on top of you; hundreds of yards of solid rock,
bones of extinct beasts, subsoil, flints, roots of growing things, green
grass and cows grazing on it--all this suspended over your head and held
back only by wooden props as thick as the calf of your leg. But because
of the speed at which the cage has brought you down, and the complete
blackness through which you have travelled, you hardly feel yourself
deeper down than you would at the bottom of the Piccadilly tube.
What is surprising, on the other hand, is the immense horizontal
distances that have to be travelled underground. Before I had been down
a mine I had vaguely imagined the miner stepping out of the cage and
getting to work on a ledge of coal a few yards away. I had not realized
that before he even gets to work he may have had to creep along passages
as long as from London Bridge to Oxford Circus. In the beginning, of
course, a mine shaft is sunk somewhere near a seam of coal; But as that
seam is worked out and fresh seams are followed up, the workings get
further and further from the pit bottom. If it is a mile from the pit
bottom to the coal face, that is probably an average distance; three
miles is a fairly normal one; there are even said to be a few mines
where it is as much as five miles. But these distances bear no relation
to distances above ground. For in all that mile or three miles as it may
be, there is hardly anywhere outside the main road, and not many places
even there, where a man can stand upright.
You do not notice the effect of this till you have gone a few hundred
yards. You start off, stooping slightly, down the dim-lit gallery, eight
or ten feet wide and about five high, with the walls built up with slabs
of shale, like the stone walls in Derbyshire. Every yard or two there
are wooden props holding up the beams and girders; some of the girders
have buckled into fantastic curves under which you have to duck. Usually
it is bad going underfoot--thick dust or jagged chunks of shale, and in
some mines where there is water it is as mucky as a farm-yard. Also
there is the track for the coal tubs, like a miniature railway track
with sleepers a foot or two apart, which is tiresome to walk on.
Everything is grey with shale dust; there is a dusty fiery smell which
seems to be the same in all mines. You see mysterious machines of which
you never learn the purpose, and bundles of tools slung together on
wires, and sometimes mice darting away from the beam of the lamps. They
are surprisingly common, especially in mines where there are or have
been horses. It would be interesting to know how they got there in the
first place; possibly by falling down the shaft--for they say a mouse
can fall any distance uninjured, owing to its surface area being so
large relative to its weight. You press yourself against the wall to
make way for lines of tubs jolting slowly towards the shaft, drawn by an
endless steel cable operated from the surface. You creep through sacking
curtains and thick wooden doors which, when they are opened, let out
fierce blasts of air. These doors are an important part of the
ventilation system. The exhausted air is sucked out of one shaft by
means of fans, and the fresh air enters the other of its own accord. But
if left to itself the air will take the shortest way round, leaving the
deeper workings unventilated; so all the short cuts have to be
partitioned off.
At the start to walk stooping is rather a joke, but it is a joke that
soon wears off. I am handicapped by being exceptionally tall, but when
the roof falls to four feet or less it is a tough job for anybody except
a dwarf or a child. You not only have to bend double, you have also got
to keep your head up all the while so as to see the beams and girders
and dodge them when they come. You have, therefore, a constant crick in
the neck, but this is nothing to the pain in your knees and thighs.
After half a mile it becomes (I am not exaggerating) an unbearable
agony. You begin to wonder whether you will ever get to the end--still
more, how on earth you are going to get back. Your pace grows slower and
slower. You come to a stretch of a couple of hundred yards where it is
all exceptionally low and you have to work yourself along in a squatting
position. Then suddenly the roof opens out to a mysterious height--scene
of and old fall of rock, probably--and for twenty whole yards you can
stand upright. The relief is overwhelming. But after this there is
another low stretch of a hundred yards and then a succession of beams
which you have to crawl under. You go down on all fours; even this is a
relief after the squatting business. But when you come to the end of the
beams and try to get up again, you find that your knees have temporarily
struck work and refuse to lift you. You call a halt, ignominiously, and
say that you would like to rest for a minute or two. Your guide (a
miner) is sympathetic. He knows that your muscles are not the same as
his. 'Only another four hundred yards,' he says encouragingly; you feel
that he might as well say another four hundred miles. But finally you do
somehow creep as far as the coal face. You have gone a mile and taken
the best part of an hour; a miner would do it in not much more than
twenty minutes. Having got there, you have to sprawl in the coal dust
and get your strength back for several minutes before you can even watch
the work in progress with any kind of intelligence.
Coming back is worse than going, not only because you are already tired
out but because the journey back to the shaft is slightly uphill. You
get through the low places at the speed of a tortoise, and you have no
shame now about calling a halt when your knees give way. Even the lamp
you are carrying becomes a nuisance and probably when you stumble you
drop it; whereupon, if it is a Davy lamp, it goes out. Ducking the beams
becomes more and more of an effort, and sometimes you forget to duck.
You try walking head down as the miners do, and then you bang your
backbone. Even the miners bang their backbones fairly often. This is the
reason why in very hot mines, where it is necessary to go about half
naked, most of the miners have what they call 'buttons down the
back'--that is, a permanent scab on each vertebra. When the track is
down hill the miners sometimes fit their clogs, which are hollow
underneath, on to the trolley rails and slide down. In mines where the
'travelling' is very bad all the miners carry sticks about two and a
half feet long, hollowed out below the handle. In normal places you keep
your hand on top of the stick and in the low places you slide your hand
down into the hollow. These sticks are a great help, and the wooden
crash-helmets--a comparatively recent invention--are a godsend. They
look like a French or Italian steel helmet, but they are made of some
kind of pith and very light, and so strong, that you can take a violent
blow on the head without feeling it. When finally you get back to the
surface you have been perhaps three hours underground and travelled two
miles, and you, are more exhausted than you would be by a
twenty-five-mile walk above ground. For a week afterwards your thighs
are so stiff that coming downstairs is quite a difficult feat; you have
to work your way down in a peculiar sidelong manner, without bending the
knees. Your miner friends notice the stiffness of your walk and chaff
you about it. ('How'd ta like to work down pit, eh?' etc.) Yet even a
miner who has been long away front work--from illness, for
instance--when he comes back to the pit, suffers badly for the first few
days.
It may seem that I am exaggerating, though no one who has been down an
old-fashioned pit (most of the pits in England are old-fashioned) and
actually gone as far as the coal face, is likely to say so. But what I
want to emphasize is this. Here is this frightful business of crawling
to and fro, which to any normal person is a hard day's work in itself;
and it is not part of the miner's work at all, it is merely an extra,
like the City man's daily ride in the Tube. The miner does that journey
to and fro, and sandwiched in between there are seven and a half hours
of savage work. I have never travelled much more than a mile to the coal
face; but often it is three miles, in which case I and most people other
than coal-miners would never get there at all. This is the kind of point
that one is always liable to miss. When you think of the coal-mine you
think of depth, heat, darkness, blackened figures hacking at walls of
coal; you don't think, necessarily, of those miles of creeping to and
fro. There is the question of time, also. A miner's working shift of
seven and a half hours does not sound very long, but one has got to add
on to it at least an hour a day for 'travelling', more often two hours
and sometimes three. Of course, the 'travelling' is not technically work
and the miner is not paid for it; but it is as like work as makes no
difference. It is easy to say that miners don't mind all this.
Certainly, it is not the same for them as it would be for you or me.
They have done it since childhood, they have the right muscles hardened,
and they can move to and fro underground with a startling and rather
horrible agility. A miner puts his head down and runs, with a long
swinging stride, through places where I can only stagger. At the
workings you see them on all fours, skipping round the pit props almost
like dogs. But it is quite a mistake to think that they enjoy it. I have
talked about this to scores of miners and they all admit that the
'travelling' is hard work; in any case when you hear them discussing a
pit among themselves the 'travelling' is always one of the things they
discuss. It is said that a shift always returns from work faster than it
goes; nevertheless the miners all say that it is the coming away after a
hard day's work, that is especially irksome. It is part of their work
and they are equal to it, but certainly it is an effort. It is
comparable, perhaps, to climbing a smallish mountain before and after
your day's work.
When you have been down in two or three pits you begin to get some grasp
of the processes that are going on underground. (I ought to say, by the
way, that I know nothing whatever about the technical side of mining: I
am merely describing what I have seen.) Coal lies in thin seams between
enormous layers of rock, so that essentially the process of getting it
out is like scooping the central layer from a Neapolitan ice. In the old
days the miners used to cut straight into the coal with pick and
crowbar--a very slow job because coal, when lying in its virgin state,
is almost as hard as rock. Nowadays the preliminary work is done by an
electrically-driven coal-cutter, which in principle is an immensely
tough and powerful band-saw, running horizontally instead of vertically,
with teeth a couple of inches long and half an inch or an inch thick. It
can move backwards or forwards on its own power, and the men operating
it can rotate it this way or that. Incidentally it makes one of the most
awful noises I have ever heard, and sends forth clouds of coal dust
which make it impossible to see more than two to three feet and almost
impossible to breathe. The machine travels along the coal face cutting
into the base of the coal and undermining it to the depth of five feet
or five feet and a half; after this it is comparatively easy to extract
the coal to the depth to which it has been undermined. Where it is
'difficult getting', however, it has also to be loosened with
explosives. A man with an electric drill, like a rather small version of
the drills used in street-mending, bores holes at intervals in the coal,
inserts blasting powder, plugs it with clay, goes round the corner if
there is one handy (he is supposed to retire to twenty-five yards
distance) and touches off the charge with an electric current. This is
not intended to bring the coal out, only to loosen it. Occasionally, of
course, the charge is too powerful, and then it not only brings the coal
out but brings the roof down as well.
After the blasting has been done the 'fillers' can tumble the coal out,
break it up and shovel it on to the conveyor belt. It comes out first in
monstrous boulders which may weigh anything up to twenty tons. The
conveyor belt shoots it on to tubs, and the tubs are shoved into the
main road and hitched on to an endlessly revolving steel cable which
drags them to the cage. Then they are hoisted, and at the surface the
coal is sorted by being run over screens, and if necessary is washed as
well. As far as possible the 'dirt'--the shale, that is--is used for
making the roads below. All what cannot be used is sent to the surface
and dumped; hence the monstrous 'dirt-heaps', like hideous grey
mountains, which are the characteristic scenery of the coal areas. When
the coal has been extracted to the depth to which the machine has cut,
the coal face has advanced by five feet. Fresh props are put in to hold
up the newly exposed roof, and during the next shift the conveyor belt
is taken to pieces, moved five feet forward and re-assembled. As far as
possible the three operations of cutting, blasting and extraction are
done in three separate shifts, the cutting in the afternoon, the
blasting at night (there is a law, not always kept, that forbids its
being done when other men are working near by), and the 'filling' in the
morning shift, which lasts from six in the morning until half past one.
Even when you watch the process of coal-extraction you probably only
watch it for a short time, and it is not until you begin making a few
calculations that you realize what a stupendous task the 'fillers' are
performing. Normally each o man has to clear a space four or five yards
wide. The cutter has undermined the coal to the depth of five feet, so
that if the seam of coal is three or four feet high, each man has to cut
out, break up and load on to the belt something between seven and twelve
cubic yards of coal. This is to say, taking a cubic yard as weighing
twenty-seven hundred-weight, that each man is shifting coal at a speed
approaching two tons an hour. I have just enough experience of pick and
shovel work to be able to grasp what this means. When I am digging
trenches in my garden, if I shift two tons of earth during the
afternoon, I feel that I have earned my tea. But earth is tractable
stuff compared with coal, and I don't have to work kneeling down, a
thousand feet underground, in suffocating heat and swallowing coal dust
with every breath I take; nor do I have to walk a mile bent double
before I begin. The miner's job would be as much beyond my power as it
would be to perform on a flying trapeze or to win the Grand National. I
am not a manual labourer and please God I never shall be one, but there
are some kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to. At a pitch I
could be a tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a
tenth-rate farm hand. But by no conceivable amount of effort or training
could I become a coal-miner, the work would kill me in a few weeks.
Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different
universes people inhabit. Down there where coal is dug is a sort of
world apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever
hearing about. Probably majority of people would even prefer not to hear
about it. Yet it is the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world
above. Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the
Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of
coal, directly or indirectly. For all the arts of peace coal is needed;
if war breaks out it is needed all the more. In time of revolution the
miner must go on working or the revolution must stop, for revolution as
much as reaction needs coal. Whatever may be happening on the surface,
the hacking and shovelling have got to continue without a pause, or at
any rate without pausing for more than a few weeks at the most. In order
that Hitler may march the goose-step, that the Pope may denounce
Bolshevism, that the cricket crowds may assemble at Lords, that the
poets may scratch one another's backs, coal has got to be forthcoming.
But on the whole we are not aware of it; we all know that we 'must have
coal', but we seldom or never remember what coal-getting involves. Here
am I sitting writing in front of my comfortable coal fire. It is April
but I still need a fire. Once a fortnight the coal cart drives up to the
door and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks
smelling of tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the
stairs. It is only very rarely, when I make a definite mental-effort,
that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the mines. It is
just 'coal'--something that I have got to have; black stuff that arrives
mysteriously from nowhere in particular, like manna except that you have
to pay for it. You could quite easily drive a car right across the north
of England and never once remember that hundreds of feet below the road
you are on the miners are hacking at the coal. Yet in a sense it is the
miners who are driving your car forward. Their lamp-lit world down there
is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the
flower.
It is not long since conditions in the mines were worse than they are
now. There are still living a few very old women who in their youth have
worked underground, with the harness round their waists, and a chain
that passed between their legs, crawling on all fours and dragging tubs
of coal. They used to go on doing this even when they were pregnant. And
even now, if coal could not be produced without pregnant women dragging
it to and fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than deprive
ourselves of coal. But-most of the time, of course, we should prefer to
forget that they were doing it. It is so with all types of manual work;
it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its existence. More than
anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of the manual
worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also
because it is so vitally necessary and yet so remote from our
experience, so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of forgetting
it as we forget the blood in our veins. In a way it is even humiliating
to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about
your own status as an 'intellectual' and a superior person generally.
For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it
is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can
remain superior. You and I and the editor of the _Times Lit._ _Supp._,
and the nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X,
author of _Marxism for Infants_--all of us _really_ owe the comparative
decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes,
with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with
arms and belly muscles of steel.
3
When the miner comes up from the pit his face is so pale that it is
noticeable even through the mask of coal dust. This is due to the foul
air that he has been breathing, and will wear off presently. To a
Southerner, new to the mining districts, the spectacle of a shift of
several hundred miners streaming out of the pit is strange and slightly
sinister. Then-exhausted faces, with the grime clinging in all the
hollows, have a fierce, wild look. At other times, when their faces are
clean, there is not much to distinguish them from the rest of the
population. They have a very upright square-shouldered walk, a reaction
from the constant bending underground, but most of them are shortish men
and their thick ill-fitting clothes hide the splendour of their bodies.
The most definitely distinctive thing about them is the blue scars on
their noses. Every miner has blue scars on his nose and forehead, and
will carry them to his death. The coal dust of which the air underground
is full enters every cut, and then the skin grows over it and forms a
blue stain like tattooing, which in fact it is. Some of the older men
have their foreheads veined like Roquefort cheeses from this cause.
As soon as the miner comes above ground he gargles a little water to get
the worst of the coal dust out of his throat and nostrils, and then goes
home and either washes or does not wash according to his temperament.
From what I have seen I should say that a majority of miners prefer to
eat their meal first and wash afterwards, as I should do in their
circumstances. It is the normal thing to see a miner sitting down to his
tea with a Christy-minstrel face, completely black except for very red
lips which become clean by eating. After his meal he takes a largish
basin of water and washes very methodically, first his hands, then his
chest, neck, and armpits, then his forearms, then his face and scalp (it
is on the scalp that the grime clings thickest), and then his wife takes
the flannel and washes his back. He has only washed the top half of his
body and probably his navel is still a nest of coal dust, but even so it
takes some skill to get pass-ably clean in a single basin of water. For
my own part I found I needed two complete baths after going down a
coal-mine. Getting the dirt out of one's eyelids is a ten minutes' job
in itself.
At some of the larger and better appointed collieries there are pithead
baths. This is an enormous advantage, for not only can the miner wash
himself all over every day, in comfort and even luxury, but at the baths
he has two lockers where he can keep his pit clothes separate from his
day clothes, so that within twenty minutes of emerging as black as a
Negro he can be riding off to a football match dressed up to the nines.
But it is only comparatively seldom because a seam of coal does not last
for ever, so that it is not necessarily worth building a bath every time
a shaft is sunk. I can-not get hold of exact figures, but it seems
likely that rather less than one miner in three has access to a pithead
bath. Probably a large majority of miners are completely black from the
waist down for at least six days a week. It is almost impossible for
them to wash all over in their own homes. Every drop of water has got to
be heated up, and in a tiny living-room which contains, apart from the
kitchen range and a quantity of furniture, a wife, some children, and
probably a dog, there is simply not room to have a proper bath. Even
with a basin one is bound to splash the furniture. Middle-class people
are fond of saying that the miners would not wash themselves properly
even if they could, but this is nonsense, as is shown by the fact that
where pithead baths exist practically all the men use them. Only among
the very old men does the belief still linger that washing one's legs
'causes lumbago'. Moreover the pithead baths, where they exist, are paid
for wholly or partly by the miners themselves, out of the Miners'
Welfare Fund. Sometimes the colliery company subscribes, some-times the
Fund bears the whole cost. But doubtless even at this late date the old
ladies in Brighton boarding-houses are saying that 'if you give those
miners baths they only use them to keep coal in'.
As a matter of fact it is surprising that miners wash as regularly as
they do, seeing how little time they have between work and sleep. It is
a great mistake to think of a miner's working day as being only seven
and a half hours. Seven and a half hours is the time spent actually on
the job, but, as I have already explained, one has got to add on to this
time taken up in 'travelling', which is seldom less than an hour and may
often be three hours. In addition most miners have to spend a
considerable time in getting to and from the pit. Throughout the
industrial districts there is an acute shortage of houses, and it is
only in the small mining villages, where the village is grouped round
the pit, that the men can be certain of living near their work. In the
larger mining towns where I have stayed, nearly everyone went to work by
bus; half a crown a week seemed to be the normal amount to spend on
fares. One miner I stayed with was working on the morning shift, which
was from six in the morning till half past one. He had to be out of bed
at a quarter to four and got back somewhere after three in the
afternoon. In another house where I stayed a boy of fifteen was working
on the night shift. He left for work at nine at night and got back at
eight in the morning, had his breakfast, and then promptly went to bed
and slept till six in the evening; so that his leisure time amounted to,
about four hours a day--actually a good deal less, if you take off the
time for washing, eating, and dressing.
The adjustments a miner's family have to make when he is changed from
one shift to another must be tiresome in the extreme. If he is on the
night shift he gets home in time for breakfast, on the morning shift he
gets home in the middle of the afternoon, and on the afternoon shift he
gets home in the middle of the night; and in each case, of course, he
wants his principal meal of the day as soon as he returns. I notice that
the Rev. W. R. Inge, in his book _England_, accuses the miners of
gluttony. From my own observation I should say that they eat
astonishingly little. Most of the miners I stayed with ate slightly less
than I did. Many of them declare that they cannot do their day's work if
they have had a heavy meal beforehand, and the food they take with them
is only a snack, usually bread-and-dripping and cold tea. They carry it
in a flat tin called a snap-can which they strap to their belts. When a
miner gets back late at night his wife waits up for him, but when he is
on the morning shift it seems to be the custom for him to get his
breakfast for himself. Apparently the old superstition that it is bad
luck to see a woman before going to work on the morning shift is not
quite extinct. In the old days, it is said, a miner who happened to meet
a woman in the early morning would often turn back and do no work that
day.
Before I had been in the coal areas I shared the wide-spread illusion
that miners are comparatively well paid. One hears it loosely stated
that a miner is paid ten or eleven shillings a shift, and one does a
small multiplication sum and concludes that every miner is earning round
about £2 a week or £150 a year. But the statement that a miner receives
ten or eleven shillings a shift is very misleading. To begin with, it is
only the actual coal 'getter' who is paid at this rate; a 'dataller',
for instance, who attends to the roofing, is paid at a lower rate,
usually eight or nine shillings a shift. Again, when the coal 'getter'
is paid piecework, so much per ton extracted, as is the case in many
mines, he is dependent on the quality of the coal; a breakdown in the
machinery or a 'fault'--that is, a streak of rock running through the
coal seam--may rob him of his earnings for a day or two at a time. But
in any case one ought not to think of the miner as working six days a
week, fifty-two weeks a year. Almost certainly there will be a number of
days when he is' laid off'. The average earning per shift worked for
every mine-worker, of all ages and both sexes, in Great Britain in 1934,
was 9s. 1 3/4d. [From the _Colliery Year Book_ and Coal Trades
Directory_ for 1935.] If everyone were in work all the time, this would
mean that the mine-worker was earning a little over £142 a year, or
nearly £2 15s. a week. His real income, however, is far lower than this,
for the 9s. 1 3/4d. is merely an average calculation on shifts actually
worked and takes no account of blank days.
I have before me five pay-checks belonging to a Yorkshire miner, for
five weeks (not consecutive) at the beginning of 1936. Averaging them
up, the gross weekly wages they represent is £2 15s. 2d.; this is an
average of nearly 9s. 2 1/2d. a shift. But these pay-checks are for the
winter, when nearly all mines are running full time. As spring advances
the coal trade slacks off and more and more men are 'temporarily
stopped', while others still technically in work are laid off for a day
or two in every week. It is obvious therefore that £150 or even £142 is
an immense over-estimate for the mine-worker's yearly income. As a
matter of fact, for the year 1934 the average gross earnings of all
miners through-out Great Britain was only £115 11s. 6d. It varied
consider-ably from district to district, rising as high as £133 2s. 8d.
in Scotland, while in Durham it was a little under £105 or barely more
than £2 a week. I take these figures from The Coal Scuttle, by Mr Joseph
Jones, Mayor of Barnsley, Yorkshire. Mr Jones adds:
These figures cover the earnings of youths as well as adults and of the
higher- as well as the lower-paid grades...any particularly high
earning would be included in these figures, as would the earnings of
certain officials and other higher-paid men as well as the higher
amounts paid for overtime work.
_The figures, being averages, fail...to reveal the position of thousands
of adult workers whose earnings were substantially below the average
and' who received only 30s. to 40s. or less per week._
Mr Jones's italics. But please notice that even these wretched earnings
are _gross_ earnings. On top of this there are all kinds of stoppages
which are deducted from the miner's wages every week. Here is a list of
weekly stoppages which was given me as typical in one Lancashire
district:
s. d.
Insurance (unemployment and health) 1 5
Hire of lamp 6
For sharpening tools 6
Check-weighman 9
Infirmary 2
Hospital 1
Benevolent Fund 6
Union fees 6
----
Total 4 5
----
Some of these stoppages, such as the Benevolent Fund and the union fees,
are, so to speak, the miner's own responsibility, others are imposed by
the colliery company. They are not the same in all districts. For
instance, the iniquitous swindle of making the miner pay for the hire of
his lamp (at sixpence a week he buys the lamp several times over in a
single year) does not obtain everywhere. But the stoppages always seem
to total up to about the same amount. On the Yorkshire miner's five
pay-checks, the average gross earning per week is £2 15s. 2d.; the
average net earning, after the stoppages have come off, is only £2 11s.
4d.--a reduction of 3s. 10d. a week. But the pay-check, naturally, only
mentions stoppages which are imposed or paid through the colliery
company; one has got to add the union fees, bringing the total reduction
up to something over four shillings. Probably it is safe to say that
stoppages of one kind and another cut four shillings or thereabouts from
_every_ adult miner's weekly wage. So that the £115 11s. 6d. which was
the mine-worker's average earning throughout Great Britain in 1934
should really be something nearer £105. As against this, most miners
receive allowances in kind, being able to purchase coal for their own
use at a reduced rate, usually eight or nine shillings a ton. But
according to Mr Jones, quoted above, 'the average value of all
allowances in kind for the country as a whole is only fourpence a day'.
And this fourpence a day is offset, in many cases, by the amount the
miner has to spend on fares in getting to and from the pit. So, taking
the industry as a whole, the sum the miner can actually bring home and
call his own does not average more, perhaps slightly less, than two
pounds a week.
Meanwhile, how much coal is the average miner producing?
The tonnage of coal raised yearly per person employed in mining rises
steadily though rather slowly. In 1914 every mine-worker produced, on
average, 253 tons of coal; in 1934 he produced 280 tons.[_The Coal
Scuttle_. The _Colliery Year Book end Coal Trades Directory_ gives a
slightly higher figure.] This of course is an average figure for
mine-workers of all kinds; those actually working at the coal face
extract an enormously greater amount--in many cases, probably, well over
a thousand tons each. But taking 280 tons as a representative figure, it
is worth noticing what a vast achievement this is. One gets the best
idea of it by comparing a miner's life with somebody else's. If I live
to be sixty I shall probably have produced thirty novels, or enough to
fill two medium-sized library shelves. In the same period the average
miner produces 8400 tons of coal; enough coal to pave Trafalgar Square
nearly two feet deep or to supply seven large families with fuel for
over a hundred years.
Of the five pay-checks I mentioned above, no less than three are
rubber-stamped with the words 'death stoppage'. When a miner is killed
at work it is usual for the other miners to make up a subscription,
generally of a shilling each, for his widow, and this is collected by
the colliery company and automatically deducted from their wages. The
significant detail here is the rubber stamp. The rate of accidents among
miners is so high, compared with that in other trades, that casualties
are taken for granted almost as they would be in a minor war. Every year
one miner in about nine hundred is killed and one in about six is
injured; most of these injuries, of course, are petty ones, but a fair
number amount to total disablement. This means that if a miner's working
life is forty years the chances are nearly seven to one against his
escaping injury and not much more than twenty to one against his being
killed outright. No other trade approaches this in dangerousness; the
next most dangerous is the shipping trade, one sailor in a little under
1300 being killed every year. The figures I have given apply, of course,
to mine-workers as a whole; for those actually working underground the
proportion of injuries would be very much higher. Every miner of long
standing that I have talked to had either been in a fairly serious
accident himself or had seen some of his mates killed, and in every
mining family they tell you tales of fathers, brothers, or uncles killed
at work. ('And he fell seven hundred feet, and they wouldn't never have
collected t'pieces only he were wearing a new suit of oil-skins,' etc.,
etc., etc.) Some of these tales are appalling in the extreme. One miner,
for instance, described to me how a mate of his, a 'dataller', was
buried by a fall of rock. They rushed to him and managed to uncover his
head and shoulders so that he could breathe, and he was alive and spoke
to them. Then they saw that the roof was coming down again and had to
run to save themselves; the 'dataller' was buried a second time. Once
again they rushed to him and got his head and shoulders free, and again
he was alive and spoke to them. Then the roof came down a third time,
and this time they could not uncover him for several hours, after which,
of course, he was dead. But the miner who told me the story (he had been
buried himself on one occasion, but he was lucky enough to have his head
jammed between his legs so that there was a small space in which he
could breathe) did not think it was a particularly appalling one. Its
significance, for him, was that the 'dataller' had known perfectly well
that the place where he was working was unsafe, and had gone there in
daily expectation of an accident. 'And it worked on his mind to that
extent that he got to kissing his wife before he went to work. And she
told me afterwards that it were over twenty years since he'd kissed
her.'
The most obviously understandable cause of accidents is explosions of
gas, which is always more or less present in the atmosphere of the pit.
There is a special lamp which is used to test the air for gas, and when
it is present in at all large quantities it can be detected by the flame
of an ordinary Davy lamp burning blue. If the wick can be turned up to
its full extent and the flame is still blue, the proportion of gas is
dangerously high; it is, nevertheless, difficult to detect, because it
does not distribute itself evenly throughout the atmosphere but hangs
about in cracks and crevices. Before starting work a miner often tests
for gas by poking his lamp into all the corners. The gas may be touched
off by a spark during blasting operations, or by a pick striking a spark
from a stone, or by a defective lamp, or by 'gob fires'--spontaneously
generated fires which' smoulder in the coal dust and are very hard to
put out. The great mining disasters which happen from time to time, in
which several hundred men are killed, are usually caused by explosions;
hence one tends to think of explosions as the chief danger of mining.
Actually, the great majority of accidents are due to the normal
every-day dangers of the pit; in particular, to falls of roof. There
are, for instance, 'pot-holes'--circular holes from which a lump of
stone big enough to kill a man shoots out with the promptitude of a
bullet. With, so far as I can remember, only one exception, all the
miners I have talked to declared that the new machinery, and 'speeding
up' generally, have made the work more dangerous. This may be partly due
to conservatism, but they can give plenty of reasons. To begin with, the
speed at which the coal is now extracted means that for hours at a time
a dangerously large stretch of roof remains unpropped. Then there is the
vibration, which tends to shake everything loose, and the noise, which
makes it harder to detect signs of danger. One must remember that a
miner's safety underground depend largely on his own care and skill. An
experienced miner claims to know by a sort of instinct when the roof is
unsafe; the way he puts it is that he 'can feel the weight on him'. He
can, for instance, hear the faint creaking of the props. The reason why
wooden props are still generally preferred to iron girders is that a
wooden prop which is about to collapse gives warning by creaking,
whereas a girder flies out un-expectedly. The devastating noise of the
machines makes it impossible to hear anything else, and thus the danger
is increased.
When a miner is hurt it is of course impossible to attend to him
immediately. He lies crushed under several hundred-weight of stone in
some dreadful cranny underground, and even after he has been extricated
it is necessary to drag his body a mile or more, perhaps, through
galleries where nobody can stand upright. Usually when you talk to a man
who has been injured you find that it was a couple of hours or so before
they got him to the surface. Sometimes, of course, there are accidents
to the cage. The cage is shooting several yards up or down at the speed
of an express train, and it is operated by somebody on the surface who
cannot see what is happening. He has very delicate indicators to tell
him how far the cage has got, but it is possible for him to make a
mistake, and there have been cases of the cage crashing into the
pit-bottom at its very maximum speed. This seems to me a dreadful way to
die. For as that tiny steel box whizzes through the blackness there must
come a moment when the ten men who are locked inside it _know_ that
something has gone wrong; and the remaining seconds before they are
smashed to pieces hardly bear thinking about. A miner told me he was
once in a cage in which something went wrong. It did not slow up when it
should have done, and they thought the cable must have snapped. As it
happened they got to the bottom safely, but when he stepped out he found
that he had broken a tooth; he had been clenching his teeth so hard in
expectation of that frightful crash.
Apart from accidents miners seem to be healthy, as obviously they have
got to be, considering the muscular efforts demanded of them. They are
liable to rheumatism and a man with defective lungs does not last long
in that dust-impregnated air, but the most characteristic industrial
disease is nystagmus. This is a disease of the eyes which makes the
eyeballs oscillate in a strange manner when they come near a light. It
is due presumably to working in half-darkness, and sometimes results in
total blindness. Miners who are disabled in this way or any other way
are compensated by the colliery company, sometimes with a lump sum,
sometimes with a weekly pension. This pension never amounts to more than
twenty-nine shillings a week; if it falls below fifteen shillings the
disabled man can also get something from the dole or the P.A.C. If I
were a disabled miner I should very much prefer the lump sum, for then
at any rate I should know that I had got my money. Disability pensions
are not guaranteed by any centralized fund, so that if the colliery
company goes bankrupt that is the end of the disabled miner's pension,
though he does figure among the other creditors.
In Wigan I stayed for a while with a miner who was suffering from
nystagmus. He could see across the room but not much further. He had
been drawing compensation of twenty-nine shillings a week for the past
nine months, but the colliery company were now talking of putting him on
'partial compensation' of fourteen shillings a week. It all depended on
whether the doctor passed him as fit for light work 'on top'. Even if
the doctor did pass him there would, needless to say, be no light work
available, but he could draw the dole and the company would have saved
itself fifteen shillings a week. Watching this man go to the colliery to
draw his compensation, I was struck by the profound differences that are
still made by _status_. Here was a man who had been half blinded in one
of the most useful of all jobs and was drawing a pension to which he had
a perfect right, if anybody has a right to anything. Yet he could not,
so to speak, _demand_ this pension--he could not, for instance, draw it
when and how he wanted it. He had to go to the colliery once a week at a
time named by the company, and when he got there he was kept waiting
about for hours in the cold wind. For all I know he was also expected to
touch his cap and show gratitude to whoever paid him; at any rate he had
to waste an afternoon and spend sixpence in bus fares. It is very
different for a member of the bourgeoisie, even such a down-at-heel
member as I am. Even when I am on the verge of starvation I have certain
rights attaching to my bourgeois status. I do not earn much more than a
miner earns, but I do at least get it paid into my bank in a
gentle-manly manner and can draw it out when I choose. And even when my
account is exhausted the bank people are passably polite.
This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept
waiting about, of having to do everything at other people's convenience,
is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly
press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is
acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a
firm conviction that 'they' will never allow him to do this, that, and
the other. Once when I was hop-picking I asked the sweated pickers (they
earn something under sixpence an hour) why they did not form a union. I
was told immediately that 'they' would never allow it. Who were 'they'?
I asked. Nobody seemed to know, but evidently 'they' were omnipotent.
A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation of
getting what he wants, within reasonable limits. Hence the fact that in
times of stress 'educated' people tend to come to the front; they are no
more gifted than the others and their 'education' is generally quite
useless in itself, but they are accustomed to a certain amount of
deference and consequently have the cheek necessary to a commander. That
they will come to the front seems to be taken for granted, always and
everywhere. In Lissagaray's _History of the Commune_ there is an
interesting passage describing the shootings that took place after the
Commune had been suppressed. The authorities were shooting the
ringleaders, and as they did not know who the ringleaders were, they
were picking them out on the principle that those of better class would
be the ringleaders. An officer walked down a line of prisoners, picking
out likely-looking types. One man was shot because he was wearing a
watch, another because he 'had an intelligent face'. I should not like
to be shot for having an intelligent face, but I do agree that in almost
any revolt the leaders would tend to be people who could pronounce their
aitches.
4
AS you walk through the industrial towns you lose yourself in labyrinths
of little brick houses blackened by smoke, festering in planless chaos
round miry alleys and little cindered yards where there are stinking
dust-bins and lines of grimy washing and half-ruinous w.c.s. The
interiors of these houses are always very much the same, though the
number of rooms varies between two or five. All have an almost exactly
similar living-room, ten or fifteen feet square, with an open kitchen
range; in the larger ones there is a scullery as well, in the smaller
ones the sink and copper are in the living-room. At the back there is
the yard, or part of a yard shared by a number of houses, just big
enough for the dustbin and the w.c.s. Not a single one has hot water
laid on. You might walk, I suppose, through literally hundreds of miles
of streets inhabited by miners, every one of whom, when he is in work,
gets black from head to foot every day, without ever passing a house in
which one could have a bath. It would have been very simple to install a
hot-water system working from the kitchen range, but the builder saved
perhaps ten pounds on each house by not doing so, and at the time when
these houses were built no one imagined that miners wanted baths.
For it is to be noted that the majority of these houses are old, fifty
or sixty years old at least, and great numbers of them are by any
ordinary standard not fit for human habitation. They go on being
tenanted simply because there are no others to be had. And that is the
central fact about housing in the industrial areas: not that the houses
are poky and ugly, and insanitary and comfortless, or that they are
distributed in incredibly filthy slums round belching foundries and
stinking canals and slag-heaps that deluge them with sulphurous
smoke--though all this is perfectly true--but simply that there are not
enough houses to go round.
'Housing shortage' is a phrase that has been bandied about pretty freely
since the war, but it means very little to anyone with an income of more
than £10 a week, or even £5 a week for that matter. Where rents are high
the difficulty is not to find houses but to find tenants. Walk down any
street in Mayfair and you will see 'To Let' boards in half the windows.
But in the industrial areas the mere difficulty of getting hold of a
house is one of the worst aggravations of poverty. It means that people
will put up with anything--any hole and corner slum, any misery of bugs
and rotting floors and cracking walls, any extortion of skinflint
landlords and blackmailing agents--simply to get a roof over their
heads. I have been into appalling houses, houses in which I would not
live a week if you paid me, and found that the tenants had been there
twenty and thirty years and only hoped they might have the luck to die
there. In general these conditions are taken as a matter of course,
though not always. Some people hardly seem to realize that such things
as decent houses exist and look on bugs and leaking roofs as acts of
God; others rail bitterly against their landlords; but all cling
desperately to their houses lest worse should befall. So long as the
housing shortage continues the local authorities cannot do much to make
existing houses more liveable. They can 'condemn' a house, but they
cannot order it to be pulled down till the tenant has another house to
go to; and so the condemned houses remain standing and are all the worse
for being condemned, because naturally the landlord will not spend more
than he can help on a house which is going to be demolished sooner or
later. In a town like Wigan, for instance, there are over two thousand
houses standing which have been condemned for years, and whole sections
of the town would be condemned en bloc if there were any hope of other
houses being built to replace them. Towns like Leeds and Sheffield have
scores of thousands of 'back to back' houses which are all of a
condemned type but will remain standing for decades.
I have inspected great numbers of houses in various mining towns and
villages and made notes on their essential points. I think I can best
give an idea of what conditions are like by transcribing a few extracts
from my notebook, taken more or less at random. They are only brief
notes and they will need certain explanations which I will give
afterwards. Here are a few from Wigan:
1. House in Wallgate quarter. Blind back type. One up, one down.
Living-room measures 12 ft by 10 ft, room upstairs the same. Alcove
under stairs measuring 5 ft by 5 ft and serving as larder, scullery, and
coal-hole. Windows will open. Distance to lavatory 50 yards. Rent 4s.
9d., rates 2s. 6d., total 7s. 3d.
2. Another near by. Measurements as above, but no alcove under stairs,
merely a recess two feet deep containing the sink--no room for larder,
etc. Rent 3s. 2d., rates 2s., total 5s. 2d.
3. House in Scholes quarter. Condemned house. One up, one down. Rooms 15
ft by 15 ft. Sink and copper in living-room, coal-hole under stairs.
Floor subsiding. No windows will open. House decently dry. Landlord
good. Rent 3s. 8d. rates 2s. 6d., total 6s. 2d.
4. Another near by. Two up, two down, and coal-hole. Walls falling
absolutely to pieces. Water comes into upstairs rooms in quantities.
Floor lopsided. Downstairs windows will not open. Landlord bad. Rent
6s., rates 3s. 6d., total 9s. 6d.
5. House in Greenough's Row. One up, two down. Living-room 13 ft by 8
ft. Walls coming apart and water comes in. Back windows will not open,
front ones will. Ten in family with eight children very near together in
age. Corporations are trying to evict them for overcrowding but cannot
find another house to send them to. Landlord bad. Rent 4s., rates 2s.
3d., total 6s. 3d.
So much for Wigan. I have pages more of the same type. Here is one from
Sheffield--a typical specimen of Sheffield's several score thousand
'back to back' houses:
House in Thomas Street. Back to back, two up, one down (i.e. a
three-storey house with one room on each storey). Cellar below.
Living-room 14 ft by 10 ft, and rooms above corresponding. Sink in
living-room. Top floor has no door but gives on open stairs, Walls in
living-room slightly damp, walls in top rooms coming to pieces and
oozing damp on all sides. House is so dark that light has to be kept
burning all day. Electricity estimated at 6d. a day (probably an
exaggeration). Six in family, parents and foul children. Husband (on
P.A.C.) is tuberculous. One child in hospital, the others appear
healthy. Tenants have been seven years in this house. Would move, but no
other house available. Rent 6s. 6d., rates included.
Here are one or two from Barnsley:
1. House in Wortley Street. Two up, one down. Living-room 12 ft by 10
ft. Sink and copper in living-room, coal-hole under stairs. Sink worn
almost flat and constantly overflowing. Walls not too sound. Penny in
slot gas-light. House very dark and gas-light estimated 4d. a day.
Upstairs rooms are really one large room partitioned into two. Walls
very bad--wall of back room cracked right through. Window-frames coming
to pieces and have to be stuffed with wood. Rain comes through in
several places. Sewer runs under house and stinks in summer but
Corporation 'says they can't do nowt'. Six people in house, two adults
and four children, the eldest aged fifteen. Youngest but one attending
hospital--tuberculosis suspected. House infested by bugs. Rent 5s. 3d.,
including rates.
2. House in Peel Street. Back to back, two up, two down and large
cellar. Living-room loft square with copper and sink. The other
downstairs room the same size, probably intended as par-lour but used as
bedroom. Upstairs rooms the same size as those below. Living-room very
dark. Gas-light estimated at 4 1/2d. a day. Distance to lavatory 70
yards. Four beds in house for eight people--two old parents, two adult
girls (the eldest aged twenty-seven), one young man, and three children.
Parents have one bed, eldest son another, and remaining five people
share the other two. Bugs very bad--'You can't keep 'em down when it's
'ot.' Indescribable squalor in downstairs room and smell upstairs almost
unbearable. Rent 5s. 7 1/2d., including rates.
3. House in Mapplewell (small mining village near Barnsley). Two up, one
down. Living-room 14 ft by 13 ft. Sink in living-room. Plaster cracking
and coming off walls. No shelves in oven. Gas leaking slightly. The
upstairs rooms each 10 ft by 8 ft. Four beds (for six persons, all
adult), but 'one bed does nowt', presumably for lack of bedclothes. Room
nearest stairs has no door and stairs have no banister, so that when you
step out of bed your foot hangs in vacancy and you may fall ten feet on
to stones. Dry rot so bad that one can see through the floor into the
room below. Bugs, but 'I keeps 'em down with sheep dip'. Earth road past
these cottages is like a muck-heap and said to be almost impassable in
winter. Stone lavatories at ends of gardens in semi-ruinous condition.
Tenants have been twenty-two years in this house. Are £11 in arrears
with rent, and have been paying an extra 1s. a week to pay this off.
Landlord now refuses this and has served orders to quit. Rent 5s.,
including rates.
And so on and so on and so on. I could multiply examples by the
score--they could be multiplied by the hundred thousand if anyone chose
to make a house-to-house inspection throughout the industrial districts.
Meanwhile some of the expressions I have used need explaining. 'One up,
one down' means one room on each storey--i.e. a two-roomed house. 'Back
to back' houses are two houses built in one, each side of the house
being somebody's front door, so that if you walk down a row of what is
apparently twelve houses you are in reality seeing not twelve houses but
twenty-four. The front houses give on the street and the back ones on
the yard, and there is only one way out of each house. The effect of
this is obvious. The lavatories are in the yard at the back, so that if
you live on the side facing the street, to get to the lavatory or the
dust-bin you have to go out of the front door and walk round the end of
the block--a distance that may be as much as two hundred yards; if you
live at the back, on the other hand, your outlook is on to a row of
lavatories. There are also houses of what is called the 'blind back'
type, which are single houses, but in which the builder has omitted to
put in a back door--from pure spite, apparently. The windows which
refuse to open are a peculiarity of old mining towns. Some of these
towns are so undermined by ancient workings that the ground is
constantly subsiding and the houses above slip sideways. In Wigan you
pass whole rows of houses which have slid to startling angles, their
windows being ten or twenty degrees out of the horizontal. Sometimes the
front wall bellies outward till it looks as though the house were seven
months gone in pregnancy. It can be refaced, but the new facing soon
begins to bulge again. When a house sinks at all suddenly its windows
are jammed for ever and the door has to be refitted. This excites no
surprise locally. The story of the miner who comes home from work and
finds that he can only get indoors by smashing down the front door with
an axe is considered humorous. In some cases I have noted 'Landlord
good' or 'Landlord bad', because there is great variation in what the
slum-dwellers say about their landlords. I found--one might expect it,
perhaps--that the small landlords are usually the worst. It goes against
the grain to say this, but one can see why it should be so. Ideally, the
worst type of slum landlord is a fat wicked man, preferably a bishop,
who is drawing an immense income from extortionate rents. Actually, it
is a poor old woman who has invested her life's savings in three slum
houses, inhabits one of them, and tries to live on the rent of the other
two--never, in consequence, having any money for repairs.
But mere notes like these are only valuable as reminders to myself. To
me as I read them they bring back what I have seen, but they cannot in
themselves give much idea of what conditions are like in those fearful
northern slums. Words are such feeble things. What is the use of a brief
phrase like 'roof leaks' or 'four beds for eight people'? It is the kind
of thing your eye slides over, registering nothing. And yet what a
wealth of misery it can cover! Take the question of overcrowding, for
instance. Quite often you have eight or even ten people living in a
three-roomed house. One of these rooms is a living-room, and as it
probably measures about a dozen feet square and contains, besides the
kitchen range and the sink, a table, some chairs, and a dresser, there
is no room in it for a bed. So there are eight or ten people sleeping in
two small rooms, probably in at most four beds. If some of these people
are adults and have to go to work, so much the worse. In one house, I
remember, three grown-up girls shared the same bed and all went to work
at different hours, each disturbing the others when she got up or came
in; in another house a young miner working on the night shift slept by
day in a narrow bed in which another member of the family slept by
night. There is an added difficulty when there are grown-up children, in
that you cannot let adolescent youths and girls sleep in the same bed.
In one family I visited there were a father and mother and a son and
daughter aged round about seventeen, and only two beds for the lot of
them. The father slept with the son and the mother with the daughter; it
was the only arrangement that ruled out the danger of incest. Then there
is the misery of leaking roofs and oozing walls, which in winter makes
some rooms almost uninhabitable. Then there are bugs. Once bugs get into
a house they are in it till the crack of doom; there is no sure way of
exterminating them. Then there are the windows that will not open. I
need not point out what this must mean, in summer, in a tiny stuffy
living-room where the fire, on which all the cooking is done, has to be
kept burning more or less constantly. And there are the special miseries
attendant upon back to back houses. A fifty yards' walk to the lavatory
or the dust-bin is not exactly an inducement to be clean. In the front
houses--at any rate in a side-street where the Corporation don't
interfere--the women get into the habit of throwing their refuse out of
the front door, so that the gutter is always littered with tea-leaves
and bread crusts. And it is worth considering what it is like for a
child to grow up in one of the back alleys where its gaze is bounded by
a row of lavatories and a wall.
In such places as these a woman is only a poor drudge muddling among an
infinity of jobs. She may keep up her spirits, but she cannot keep up
her standards of cleanliness and tidiness. There is always something to
be done, and no conveniences and almost literally not room to turn
round. No sooner have you washed one child's face than another's is
dirty; before you have washed the crocks from one meal the next is due
to be cooked. I found great variation in the houses I visited. Some were
as decent as one could possibly expect in the circumstances, some were
so appalling that I have no hope of describing them adequately. To begin
with, the smell, the dominant and essential thing, is indescribable. But
the squalor and the confusion! A tub full of filthy water here, a basin
full of unwashed crocks there, more crocks piled in any odd corner, torn
newspaper littered everywhere, and in the middle always the same
dreadful table covered with sticky oilcloth and crowded with cooking
pots and irons and half-darned stockings and pieces of stale bread and
bits of cheese wrapped round with greasy newspaper! And the congestion
in a tiny room where getting from one side to the other is a complicated
voyage between pieces of furniture, with a line of damp washing getting
you in the face every time you move and the children as thick underfoot
as toadstools! There are scenes that stand out vividly in my memory. The
almost bare living-room of a cottage in a little mining village, where
the whole family was out of work and everyone seemed to be underfed; and
the big family of grown-up sons and daughters sprawling aimlessly about,
all strangely alike with red hair, splendid bones, and pinched faces
ruined by malnutrition and idleness; and one tall son sitting by the
fire-place, too listless even to notice the entry of a stranger, and
slowly peeling a sticky sock from a bare foot. A dreadful room in Wigan
where all the furniture seemed to be made of packing cases and barrel
staves and was coming to pieces at that; and an old woman with a
blackened neck and her hair coining down denouncing her landlord in a
Lancashire-Irish accent; and her mother, aged well over ninety, sitting
in the background on the barrel that served her as a commode and
regarding us blankly with a yellow, cretinous face. I could fill up
pages with memories of similar interiors.
Of course the squalor of these people's houses is some-times their own
fault. Even if you live in a back to back house and have four children
and a total income of thirty-two and sixpence a week from the P.A.C.,
there is no need to have unemptied chamber-pots standing about in your
living-room. But it is equally certain that their circumstances do not
encourage self-respect. The determining factor is probably the number of
children. The best-kept interiors I saw were always childless houses or
houses where there were only one or two children; with, say, six
children in a three-roomed house it is quite impossible to keep anything
decent. One thing that is very noticeable is that the worst squalors are
never downstairs. You might visit quite a number of houses, even among
the poorest of the unemployed, and bring away a wrong impression. These
people, you might reflect, cannot be so badly off if they still have a
fair amount of furniture and crockery. But it is in the rooms upstairs
that the gauntness of poverty really discloses itself. Whether this is
because pride makes people cling to their living-room furniture to the
last, or because bedding is more pawnable, I do not know, but certainly
many of the bedrooms I saw were fearful places. Among people who have
been unemployed for several years continuously I should say it is the
exception to have anything like a full set of bedclothes. Often there is
nothing that can be properly called bedclothes at all--just a heap of
old overcoats and miscellaneous rags on a rusty iron bedstead. In this
way overcrowding is aggravated. One family of four persons that I knew,
a father and mother and two children, possessed two beds but could only
use one of them because they had not enough bedding for the other.
Anyone who wants to see the effects of the housing shortage at their
very worse should visit the dreadful caravan-dwellings that exist in
numbers in many of the northern towns. Ever since the war, in the
complete impossibility of getting houses, parts of the population have
overflowed into supposedly temporary quarters in fixed caravans. Wigan,
for instance, with a population of about 85,000, has round about 200
caravan-dwellings with a family in each--perhaps somewhere near 1000
people in all. How many of these caravan-colonies exist throughout the
industrial areas it would be difficult to discover with any accuracy.
The local authorities are reticent about them and the census report of
1931 seems to have decided to ignore them. But so far as I can discover
by inquiry they are to be found in most of the larger towns in
Lancashire and Yorkshire, and perhaps further north as well. The
probability is that throughout the north of England there are some
thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of _families_ (not individuals) who
have no home except a fixed caravan.
But the word 'caravan' is very misleading. It calls up a picture of a
cosy gypsy-encampment (in fine weather, of course) with wood fires
crackling and children picking blackberries and many-coloured washing
fluttering on the lines. The caravan-colonies in Wigan and Sheffield are
not like that. I had a look at several of them, I inspected those in
Wigan with considerable care, and I have never seen comparable squalor
except in the Far East. Indeed when I saw them I was immediately
reminded of the filthy kennels in which I have seen Indian coolies
living in Burma. But, as a matter of fact, nothing in the East could
ever be quite as bad, for in the East you haven't our clammy,
penetrating cold to contend with, and the sun is a disinfectant.
Along the banks of Wigan's miry canal are patches of waste ground on
which the caravans have been dumped like rubbish shot out of a bucket.
Some of them are actually gypsy caravans, but very old ones and in bad
repair. The majority are old single-decker buses (the rather smaller
buses of ten years ago) which have been taken off their wheels and
propped up with struts of wood. Some are simply wagons with
semi-circular slats on top, over which canvas is stretched, so that the
people inside have nothing but canvas between them and the outer air.
Inside, these places are usually about five feet wide by six high (I
could not stand quite upright in any of them) and anything from six to
fifteen feet long. Some, I suppose, are inhabited by only one person,
but I did not see any that held less than two persons, and some of them
contained large families. One, for instance, measuring fourteen feet
long, had seven people in it--seven people in about 450 cubic feet of
space; which is to say that each person had for his entire dwelling a
space a _good deal_ smaller than one compartment of a public lavatory.
The dirt and congestion of these places is such that you cannot well
imagine it unless you have tested it with your own eyes and more
particularly your nose. Each contains a tiny cottage kitchener and such
furniture as can be crammed in--sometimes two beds, more usually one,
into which the whole family have to huddle as best they can. It is
almost impossible to sleep on the floor, because the damp soaks up from
below. I was shown mat-tresses which were still wringing wet at eleven
in the morning. In winter it is so cold that the kitcheners have to be
kept burning day and night, and the windows, need-less to say, are never
opened. Water is got from a hydrant common to the whole colony, some of
the caravan-dwellers having to walk 150 or 200 yards for every bucket of
water. There are no sanitary arrangements at all. Most of the people
construct a little hut to serve as a lavatory on the tiny patch of
ground surrounding their caravan, and once a week dig a deep hole in
which to bury the refuse. All the people I saw in these places,
especially the children, were unspeakably dirty, and I do not doubt that
they were lousy as well. They could not possibly be otherwise. The
thought that haunted me as I went from caravan to caravan was, What can
happen in those cramped interiors when anybody dies? But that, of
course, is the kind of question you hardly care to ask.
Some of the people have been in their caravans for many years.
Theoretically the Corporation are doing away with the caravan-colonies
and getting the inhabitants out into houses; but as the houses don't get
built, the caravans remain standing. Most of the people I talked to had
given up the idea of ever getting a decent habitation again. They were
all out of work, and a job and a house seemed to them about equally
remote and impossible. Some hardly seemed to care; others realized quite
clearly in what misery they were living. One woman's face stays by me, a
worn skull-like face on which was a look of intolerable misery and
degradation. I gathered that in that dreadful pigsty, struggling to keep
her large brood of children clean, she felt as I should feel if I were
coated all over with dung. One must remember that these people are not
gypsies; they are decent English people who have all, except the
children born there, had homes of their own in their day; besides, their
caravans are greatly inferior to those of gypsies and they have not the
great advantage of being on the move. No doubt there are still
middle-class people who think that the Lower Orders don't mind that kind
of thing and who, if they happened to pass a caravan-colony in the
train, would immediately assume that the people lived there from choice.
I never argue nowadays with that kind of person. But it is worth
noticing that the caravan-dwellers don't even save money by living
there, for they are paying about the same rents as they would for
houses. I could not hear of any rent lower than five shillings a week
(five shillings for 200 cubic feet of space!) and there are even cases
where the rent is as high as ten shillings. Somebody must be making a
good thing out of those caravans! But dearly their continued existence
is due to the housing shortage and not directly to poverty.
Talking once with a miner I asked him when the housing shortage first
became acute in his district; he answered, 'When we were told about it',
meaning that till recently people's standards were so low that they took
almost any degree of overcrowding for granted. He added that when he was
a child his family had slept eleven in a room and thought nothing of it,
and that later, when he was grown-up, he and his wife had lived in one
of the old-style back to back houses in which you not only had to walk a
couple of hundred yards to the lavatory but often had to wait in a queue
when you got there, the lavatory being shared by thirty-six people. And
when his wife was sick with the illness that killed her, she still had
to make that two hundred yards' journey to the lavatory. This, he said,
was the kind of thing people would put up with 'till they were told
about it'.
I do not know whether that is true. What is certain is that nobody now
thinks it bearable to sleep eleven in a room, and that even people with
comfortable incomes are vaguely troubled by the thought of 'the slums'.
Hence the clatter about 'rehousing' and 'slum clearance' which we have
had at intervals ever since the war. Bishops, politicians,
philanthropists, and what not enjoy talking piously about 'slum
clearance', because they can thus divert attention from more serious
evils and pretend that if you abolish the slums you abolish poverty. But
all this talk has led to surprisingly small results. So far as one can
discover, the congestion is no better, perhaps slightly worse, than it
was a dozen years ago. There is certainly great variation in the speed
at which the different towns are attacking their housing problem. In
some towns building seems to be almost at a standstill, in others it is
proceeding rapidly and the private landlord is being driven out of
business. Liverpool, for instance, has been very largely rebuilt, mainly
by the efforts of the Corporation. Sheffield, too, is being torn down
and rebuilt pretty fast, though perhaps, considering the unparalleled
beastliness of its slums, not quite fast enough.[The number of
Corporation houses in process of construction in Sheffield at the
beginning of 1936 was 1398. To replace the slum areas entirely Sheffield
is said to need 100,000 houses.]
Why rehousing has on the whole moved so slowly, and why some towns can
borrow money for building purposes so much more easily than others, I do
not know. Those questions would have to be answered by someone who knows
more about the machinery of local government than I do. A Corporation
house costs normally somewhere between three and four hundred pounds; it
costs rather less when it is built by 'direct labour' than when built by
contract. The rent of these houses would average something over twenty
pounds a year not counting rates, so one would think that, even allowing
for overhead expenses and interest on loans, it would pay any
Corporation to build as many houses as could be tenanted. In many cases,
of course, the houses would have to be inhabited by people on the
P.A.C., so that the local bodies would merely be taking money out of one
pocket and putting it into another--i.e. paying out money in the form of
relief and taking it back in the form of rent. But they have got to pay
the relief in any case, and at present a proportion of what they pay is
being swallowed up by private landlords. The reasons given for the slow
rate of building are lack of money and the difficulty of getting hold of
sites--for Corporation houses are not erected piecemeal but in
'estates', sometimes of hundreds of houses at a time. One thing that
always strikes me as mysterious is that so many of the northern towns
see fit to build themselves immense and luxurious public buildings at
the same time as they are in crying need of dwelling houses. The town of
Barnsley, for instance, recently spent close on £150,000 on a new town
hall, although admittedly needing at least 2000 new working-class
houses, not to mention public baths. (The public baths in Barnsley
contain nineteen men's slipper baths--this in a town of 70,000
inhabitants, largely miners, not one of whom has a bath in his house!)
For £150,000 it could have built 350 Corporation houses and still had
£10,000 to spend on a town hall. However, as I say, I do not pretend to
understand the mysteries of local government. I merely record the fact
that houses are desperately needed and are being built, on the whole,
with paralytic slowness.
Still, houses are being built, and the Corporation building estates,
with their row upon row of little red houses, all much liker than two.
peas (where did that expression come from? Peas have great
individuality) are a regular feature of the outskirts of the industrial
towns. As to what they are like and how they compare with the slum
houses, I can best give an idea by transcribing two more extracts from
my diary. The tenants' opinions of their houses vary greatly, so I will
give one favourable extract and one unfavourable. Both of these are from
Wigan and both are the cheaper 'non-parlour type' houses:
1. House in Beech Hill Estate.
_Downstairs_. Large living-room with kitchener fireplace, cup-boards,
and fixed dresser, composition floor. Small hallway, largish kitchen. Up
to date electric cooker hired from Corporation at much the same rate as
a gas cooker.
_Upstairs_. Two largish bedrooms, one tiny one--suitable only for a
boxroom or temporary bedroom. Bathroom, w.c., with hot and cold water.
Smallish garden. These vary throughout the estate, but mostly rather
smaller than an allotment.
Four in family, parents and two children. Husband in good employ. Houses
appear well built and are quite agreeable to look at. Various
restrictions, e.g. it is forbidden to keep poultry or pigeons, take in
lodgers, sub-let, or start any kind of business with-out leave from the
Corporation. (This is easily granted in the case of taking in lodgers,
but not in any of the others.) Tenant' very well satisfied with house
and proud of it. Houses in this estate all well kept. Corporation are
good about repairs, but keep tenants up to the mark with regard to
keeping the place tidy, etc.
Rent 11s. 3d. including rates. Bus fare into town 2d.
2. House in Welly Estate.
_Downstairs_. Living-room 14 ft by 10 ft, kitchen a good deal smaller,
tiny larder under stairs, small but fairly good bathroom. Gas cooker,
electric lighting. Outdoor w.c.
_Upstairs_. One bedroom 12 ft by 10 ft with tiny fireplace, another the
same size without fireplace, another 7 ft by 6 ft. Best bedroom has
small wardrobe let into wall. 'Garden about 20 yards by 10.
Six in family, parents and four children, eldest son nineteen, eldest
daughter twenty-two. None in work except eldest son. Tenants very
discontented. Their complaints are: 'House is cold, draughty, and damp.
Fireplace in living-room gives out no heat and makes room very
dusty--attributed to its being set too low. Fireplace in best bedroom
too small to be of any use. Walls upstairs cracking. Owing to
uselessness of tiny bedroom, five are sleeping in one bedroom, one (the
eldest son) in the other.'
Gardens in this estate all neglected.
Rent 10s. 3d., inclusive. Distance to town a little over a mile--there
is no bus here.
I could multiply examples, but these two are enough, as the types of
Corporation houses being built do not vary greatly from place to place.
Two things are immediately obvious. The first is that at their very
worst the Corporation houses are better than the slums they replace. The
mere possession of a bathroom and a bit of garden would out-weigh almost
any disadvantage. The other is that they are much more expensive to live
in. It is common enough for a man to be turned out of a condemned house
where he is paying six or seven shillings a week and given a Corporation
house where he has to pay ten. This only affects those who are in work
or have recently been in work, because when a man is on the P.A.C. his
rent is assessed at a quarter of his dole, and if it is more than this
he gets an extra allowance; in any case, there are certain classes of
Corporation houses to which people on the dole are not admitted. But
there are other ways in which life in a Corporation estate is expensive,
whether you are in work or out of it. To begin with, owing to the higher
rents, the shops in the estate are much more expensive and there are not
so many of them. Then again, in a comparatively large, detached house,
away from the frowsy huddle of the slum, it is much colder and more fuel
has to be burnt. And again there is the expense, especially for a man in
work, of getting to and from town. This last is one of the more obvious
problems of rehousing. Slum clearance means diffusion of the population.
When you rebuild on a large scale, what you do in effect is to scoop out
the centre of the town and redistribute it on the outskirts. This is all
very well in a way; you have got the people out of fetid alleys into
places where they have room to breathe; but from the point of view of
the people themselves, what you have done is to pick them up and dump
them down five miles from their work. The simplest solution is flats. If
people are going to live in large towns at all they must learn to live
on top of one another. But the northern working people do not take
kindly to flats; even where fiats exist they are contemptuously named
'tenements'. Almost everyone will tell you that he 'wants a house of his
own', and apparently a house in the middle of an unbroken block of
houses a hundred yards long seems to them more 'their own' than a flat
situated in mid-air.
To revert to the second of the two Corporation houses I have just
mentioned. The tenant complained that the house was cold, damp, and so
forth. Perhaps the house was jerry-built, but equally probably he was
exaggerating. He had come there from a filthy hovel in the middle of
Wigan which I happened to have inspected previously; while there he had
made every effort to get hold of a Corporation house, and he was no
sooner in the Corporation house than he wanted to be back in the slum.
This looks like mere captiousness but it covers a perfectly genuine
grievance. In very many cases, perhaps in half the cases, I found that
the people in Corporation houses don't really like them. They are glad
to get out of the stink of the slum, they know that it is better for
their children to have space to play about in, but they don't feel
really at home. The exceptions are usually people in good employ who can
afford to spend a little extra on fuel and furniture and journeys, and
who in any case are of 'superior' type. The others, the typical
slum-dwellers, miss the frowsy warmth of the slum. They complain that
'out in the country', i.e. on the edge of the town, they are 'starving'
(freezing). Certainly most Corporation estates are pretty bleak in
winter. Some I have been through, perched on treeless clayey hillsides
and swept by icy winds, would be horrible places to live in. It is not
that slum-dwellers want dirt and congestion for their own sakes, as the
fat-bellied bourgeoisie love to believe. (See for instance the
conversation about slum-clearance in Galsworthy's Swan Song, where the
rentier's cherished belief that the slum-dweller makes the slum, and not
vice versa, is put into the mouth of a philanthropic Jew.) Give people a
decent house and they will soon learn to keep it decent. Moreover, with
a smart-looking house to live up to they improve in self-respect and
cleanliness, and their children start life with better chances.
Nevertheless, in a Corporation estate there is an uncomfortable, almost
prison-like atmosphere, and the people who live there are perfectly well
aware of it.
And it is here that one comes on the central difficulty of the housing
problem. When you walk through the smoke-dim slums of Manchester you
think that nothing is needed except to tear down these abominations and
build decent houses in their place. But the trouble is that in
destroying the slum you destroy other things as well. Houses are I'
desperately needed and are not being built fast enough; but in so far as
rehousing is being done, it is being done--perhaps it is unavoidable--in
a monstrously inhuman 'manner. I don't mean merely that the houses are
new and ugly. All houses have got to be new at some time, and as a
matter of fact the type of Corporation house now being built is not at
all offensive to look at. On the outskirts of Liverpool there are what
amount to whole towns consisting entirely of Corporation houses, and
they are quite pleasing to the eye; the blocks of workers' flats in the
centre of the town modelled, I believe, on the workers' flats in Vienna,
are definitely fine buildings. But there is something ruthless and
soulless about the whole business. Take, for instance, the restrictions
with which you are burdened in a Corporation house. You are not allowed
to keep your house and garden as you want them--in some estates there is
even a regulation that every garden must have the same kind of hedge.
You are not allowed to keep poultry or pigeons. The Yorkshire miners are
fond of keeping homer pigeons; they keep them in the back yard and take
them out and race them on Sundays. But pigeons are messy birds and the
Corporation suppresses them as a matter of course. The restrictions
about shops are more serious. The number of shops in a Corporation
estate is rigidly limited, and it is said that preference is given to
the Co-op and the chain stores; this may not be strictly true, but
certainly those are the shops that one usually sees there. This is bad
enough for the general public, but from the point of view of the
independent shopkeeper it is a disaster. Many a small shopkeeper is
utterly ruined by some rehousing scheme which takes no notice of his
existence. A whole section of the town is condemned en bloc; presently
the houses are pulled down and the people are transferred to some
housing estate miles away. In this way all the small shopkeepers of the
quarter have their whole clientele taken away from them at a single
swoop and receive not a penny of compensation. They cannot transfer
their business to the estate, because even if they can afford the move
and the much higher rents, they would probably be refused a licence. As
for pubs, they are banished from the housing estates almost completely,
and the few that remain are dismal sham-Tudor places fitted out by the
big brewery companies and very expensive. For a middle-class population
this would be a nuisance--it might mean walking a mile to get a glass of
beer; for a working-class population, which uses the pub as a kind of
club, it is a serious blow at communal life. It is a great achievement
to get slum-dwellers into decent houses, but it is unfortunate that,
owing to the peculiar temper of our time, it is also considered
necessary to rob them of the last vestiges of their liberty. The people
themselves feel this, and it is this feeling that they are rationalizing
when they complain that their new houses--so much better, as houses,
than those they have come out of--are cold and uncomfortable and
'unhomelike'.
I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal
vigilance as eternal dirt. There are some Corporation estates in which
new tenants are systematically de-loused before being allowed into their
houses. All their possessions except what they stand up in are taken
away from them, fumigated, and sent on to the new house. This procedure
has its points, for it is a pity that people should take bugs into brand
new houses (a bug will follow you about in your luggage if he gets half
a chance), but it is the kind of thing that makes you wish that the word
'hygiene' could be dropped out of the dictionary. Bugs are bad, but a
state of affairs in which men will allow themselves to be dipped like
sheep is worse. 'Perhaps, however, when it is a case of slum clearance,
one must take for granted a certain amount of restrictions and
inhumanity. When all is said and done, the most important thing is that
people shall live in decent houses and not in pigsties. I have seen too
much of slums to go into Chestertonian raptures about them. A place
where the children can breathe clean air, and women have a few
conveniences to save them from drudgery, and a man has a bit of garden
to dig in, must be better than the stinking back-streets of Leeds and
Sheffield. On balance, the Corporation Estates are better than the
slums; but only by a small margin.
When I was looking into the housing question I visited and inspected
numbers of houses, perhaps a hundred or two hundred houses altogether,
in various mining towns and villages. I cannot end this chapter without
remarking on the extraordinary courtesy and good nature with which I was
received everywhere. I did not go alone--I always had some local friend
among the unemployed to show me round--but even so, it is an
impertinence to go poking into strangers' houses and asking to see the
cracks in the bedroom wall. Yet everyone was astonishingly patient and
seemed to understand almost without explanation why I was questioning
them and what I wanted to see. If any unauthorized person walked into
_my_ house and began asking me whether the roof leaked and whether I was
much troubled by bugs and what I thought of my landlord, I should
probably tell him to go to hell. This only happened to me once, and in
that case the woman was slightly deaf and took me for a Means Test nark;
but even she relented after a while and gave me the information I
wanted.
I am told that it is bad form for a writer to quote his own reviews, but
I want here to contradict a reviewer in the _Manchester Guardian_ who
says apropos of one of my books:
Set down in Wigan or Whitechapel Mr Orwell would still exercise an
unerring power of closing his vision to all that is good in order to
proceed with his wholehearted vilification of humanity.
Wrong. Mr Orwell was 'set down' in Wigan for quite a while and it did
not inspire him with any wish to vilify humanity. He liked Wigan very
much--the people, not the scenery. Indeed, he has only one fault to find
with it, and that is in respect of the celebrated Wigan Pier, which he
had set his heart on seeing. Alas! Wigan Pier had been demolished, and
even the spot where it used to stand is no longer certain.
5
When you see the unemployment figures quoted at two millions, it is
fatally easy to take this as meaning that two million people are out of
work and the rest of the population is comparatively comfortable. I
admit that till recently I was in the habit of doing so myself. I used
to calculate that if you put the registered unemployed at round about
two millions and threw in the destitute and those who for one reason and
another were not registered, you might take the number of underfed
people in England (for everyone on the dole or thereabouts is underfed)
as being, at the very most, five millions.
This is an enormous under-estimate, because, in the first place, the
only people shown on unemployment figures are those actually drawing the
dole--that is, in general, heads of families. An unemployed man's
dependants do not figure on the list unless they too are drawing a
separate allowance. A Labour Exchange officer told me that to get at the
real number of people _living on_ (not drawing) the dole, you have got
to multiply the official figures by something over three. This alone
brings the number of unemployed to round about six millions. But in
addition there are great numbers of people who are in work but who, from
a financial point of view, might equally well be unemployed, because
they are not drawing anything that can be described as a living
wage.[For instance, a recent census of the Lancashire cotton mills
revealed the fact that over 40,000 full-time employees receive less than
thirty shillings a week each. In Preston, to take only one town, the
number receiving over thirty shillings a week was 640 and the number
receiving wider thirty shillings was 3113.] Allow for these and their
dependants, throw in as before the old-age pensioners, the destitute,
and other nondescripts, and you get an _underfed_ population of well
over ten millions. Sir John Orr puts it at twenty millions.
Take the figures for Wigan, which is typical enough of the industrial
and mining districts. The number of insured workers is round about
36,000 (26,000 men and 10,000 women). Of these, the number unemployed at
the beginning of 1936 was about 10,000. But this was in winter when the
mines are working full time; in summer it would probably be 12,000.
Multiply by three, as above, and you get 30,000 or 36,000. The total
population of Wigan is a little under 87,000; so that at any moment more
than one person in three out of the whole population--not merely the
registered workers--is either drawing or living on the dole. Those ten
or twelve thousand unemployed contain a steady core of from four to five
thousand miners who have been continuously unemployed for the past seven
years. And Wigan is not especially badly off as industrial towns go.
'Even in Sheffield, which has been doing well for the last year or so
because of wars and rumours of war, the proportion of unemployment is
about the same--one in three of registered workers unemployed.
When a man is first unemployed, until his insurance stamps are
exhausted, he draws 'full benefit', of which the rates are as follows:
per week
Single man 17s.
Wife 9s.
Each child below 14 3s.
Thus in a typical family of parents and three children of whom one was
over fourteen, the total income would be 32s. per week, plus anything
that might be earned by the eldest child. When a man's stamps are
exhausted, before being turned over to the P.A.C. (Public Assistance
Committee), he receives twenty-six weeks' 'transitional benefit' from
the U.A.B. (Unemployment Assistance Board), the rates being as follows:
per week
Single man 15s.
Man and wife 24s.
Children 14-18 6s.
Children 11-14 4s. 6d.
Children 8-11 4s.
Children 5-8 3s. 6d.
Children 3-5 3s.
Thus on the U.A.B. the income of the typical family of five persons
would be 37s. 6d. a week if no child was in work. When a man is on the
U.A.B. a quarter of his dole is regarded as rent, with a minimum of 7s.
6d. a week. If the rent he is paying is more than a quarter of his dole
he receives an extra allowance, but if it is less than 7s. 6d., a
corresponding amount is deducted. Payments on the P.A.C. theoretically
comes out of the local rates, but are backed by a central fund. The
rates of benefit are:
per week
Single man 12s. 6d.
Man and wife 23s.
Eldest child 4s.
Any other child 3s.
Being at the discretion of the local bodies these rates vary slightly,
and a single man may or may not get an extra 2s. 6d. weekly, bringing
his benefit up to 15s. As on the U.A.B., a quarter of a married man's
dole is regarded as rent. Thus in the typical family considered above
the total income would be 33s. a week, a quarter of this being regarded
as rent. In addition, in most districts a coal allowance of 1s. 6d. a
week (1s. 6d. is equivalent to about a hundredweight of coal) is granted
for six weeks before and six weeks after Christmas.
It will be seen that the income of a family on the dole normally
averages round about thirty shillings a week. One can write at least a
quarter of this off as rent, which is to say that the average person,
child or adult, has got to be fed, clothed, warmed, and otherwise
cared-for for six or seven shillings a week. Enormous groups of people,
probably at least a third of the whole population of the industrial
areas, are living at this level. The Means Test is very strictly
enforced, and you are liable to be refused relief at the slightest hint
that you are getting money from another source. Dock-labourers, for
instance, who are generally hired by the half-day, have to sign on at a
Labour Exchange twice daily; if they fail to do so it is assumed that
they have been working and their dole is reduced correspondingly. I have
seen cases of evasion of the Means Test, but I should say that in the
industrial towns, where there is still a certain amount of communal life
and everyone has neighbours who know him, it is much harder than it
would be in London. The usual method is for a young man who is actually
living with his parents to get an accommodation address, so that
supposedly he has a separate establishment and draws a separate
allowance. But there is much spying and tale-bearing. One man I knew,
for instance, was seen feeding his neighbour's chickens while the
neighbour was away. It was reported to the authorities that he 'had a
job feeding chickens' and he had great difficulty in refuting this. The
favourite joke in Wigan was about a man who was refused relief on the
ground that he 'had a job carting firewood'. He had been seen, it was
said, carting firewood at night. He had to explain that he was not
carting firewood but doing a moonlight flit. The 'firewood' was his
furniture.
The most cruel and evil effect of the Means Test is the way in which it
breaks up families. Old people, sometimes bedridden, are driven out of
their homes by it. An old age pensioner, for instance, if a widower,
would normally live with one or other of his children; his weekly ten
shillings goes towards the household expenses, and probably he is not
badly cared for. Under the Means Test, however, he counts as a 'lodger'
and if he stays at home his children's dole will be docked. So, perhaps
at seventy or seventy-five years of age, he has to turn out into
lodgings, handing his pension over to the lodging-house keeper and
existing on the verge of starvation. I have seen several cases of this
myself. It is happening all over England at this moment, thanks to the
Means Test.
Nevertheless, in spite of the frightful extent of unemployment, it is a
fact that poverty--extreme poverty--is less in evidence in the
industrial North than it is in London. Everything is poorer and
shabbier, there are fewer motor-cars and fewer well-dressed people; but
also there are fewer people who are obviously destitute. Even in a town
the size of Liverpool or Manchester you are struck by the fewness of the
beggars. London is a sort of whirlpool which draws derelict people
towards it, and it is so vast that life there is solitary and anonymous.
Until you break the law nobody will take any notice of you, and you can
go to pieces as you could not possibly do in a place where you had
neighbours who knew you. But in the industrial towns the old communal
way of life has not yet broken up, tradition is still strong and almost
everyone has a family--potentially, therefore, a home. In a town of
50,000 or 100,000 inhabitants there is no casual and as it were
unaccounted-for population; nobody sleeping in the streets, for
instance. Moreover, there is just this to be said for the unemployment
regulations, that they do not discourage people from marrying. A man and
wife on twenty-three shillings a week are not far from the starvation
line, but they can make a home of sorts; they are vastly better off than
a single man on fifteen shillings. The life of a single unemployed man
is dreadful. He lives sometimes in a common lodging-house, more often in
a 'furnished' room for which he usually pays six shillings a week,
finding himself as best he can on the other nine (say six shillings a
week for food and three for clothes, tobacco, and amusements). Of course
he cannot feed or look after himself properly, and a man who pays six
shillings a week for his room is not encouraged to be indoors more than
is necessary. So he spends his days loafing in the public library or any
other place where he can keep warm. That keeping warm--is almost the
sole preoccupation of a single unemployed man in winter. In Wigan a
favourite refuge was the pictures, which are fantastically cheap there.
You can always get a seat for fourpence, and at the matinee at some
houses you can even get a seat for twopence. Even people on the verge of
starvation will readily pay twopence to get out of the ghastly cold of a
winter afternoon. In Sheffield I was taken to a public hall to listen to
a lecture by a clergyman, and it was by a long way the silliest and
worst-delivered lecture I have ever heard or ever expect to hear. I
found it physically impossible to sit it out, indeed my feet carried me
out, seemingly of their own accord, before it was half-way through. Yet
the hall was thronged with unemployed men; they would have sat through
far worse drivel for the sake of a warm place to shelter in.
At times I have seen unmarried men on the dole living in the extreme of
misery. In one town I remember a whole colony of them who were
squatting, more or less illicitly, in a derelict house which was
practically falling down. They had collected a few scraps of furniture,
presumably off refuse-tips, and I remember that their sole table was an
old marble-topped wash-hand-stand. But this kind of thing is
exceptional. A working-class bachelor is a rarity, and so long as a man
is married unemployment makes comparatively little alteration in his way
of life. His home is impoverished but it is still a home, and it is
noticeable everywhere that the anomalous position created by
unemployment--the man being out of work while the woman's work continues
as before--has not altered the relative status of the sexes. In a
working-class home it is the man who is the master and not, as in a
middle-class home, the woman or the baby. Practically never, for
instance, in a working-class home, will you see the man doing a stroke
of the housework. Unemployment has not changed this convention, which on
the face of it seems a little unfair. The man is idle from morning to
night but the woman is as busy as ever--more so, indeed, because she has
to manage with less money. Yet so far as my experience goes the women do
not protest. I believe that they, as well as the men, feel that a man
would lose his manhood if, merely because he was out of work, he
developed into a 'Mary Ann'.
But there is no doubt about the deadening, debilitating effect of
unemployment upon everybody, married or single, and upon men more than
upon women. The best intellects will not stand up against it. Once or
twice it has happened to me to meet unemployed men of genuine literary
ability; there are others whom I haven't met but whose work I
occasionally see in the magazines. Now and again, at long intervals,
these men will produce an article or a short story which is quite
obviously better than most of the stuff that gets whooped up by the
blurb-reviewers. Why, then, do they make so little use of their talents?
They have all the leisure in the world; why don't they sit down and
write books? Because to write books you need not only comfort and
solitude--and solitude is never easy to attain in a working-class
home--you also need peace of mind. You can't settle to anything, you
can't command the spirit of _hope_ in which anything has got to be
created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you.
Still, an unemployed man who feels at home with books can at any rate
occupy himself by reading. But what about the man who cannot read
without discomfort? Take a miner, for instance, who has worked in the
pit since childhood and has been trained to be a miner and nothing else.
How the devil is he to fill up the empty days? It is absurd to say that
he ought to be looking for work. There is no work to look for, and
everybody knows it. You can't go on looking for work every day for seven
years. There are allotments, which occupy the time and help to feed a
family, but in a big town there are only allotments for a small
proportion of the people. Then there are the occupational centres which
were started a few years ago to help the unemployed. On the whole this
movement has been a failure, but some of the centres are still
flourishing. I have visited one or two of them. There are shelters where
the men can keep warm and there are periodical classes in carpentering,
boot-making, leather-work, handloom-weaving, basket-work, sea-grass
work, etc., etc.; the idea being that the men can make furniture and so
forth, not for sale but for their own homes, getting tools free and
materials cheaply. Most of the Socialists I have talked to denounce this
movement as they denounce the project--it is always being talked about
but it never comes to anything--to give the unemployed small-holdings.
They say that the occupational centres are simply a device to keep the
unemployed quiet and give them the illusion that something is being done
for them. Undoubtedly that is the underlying motive. Keep a man busy
mending boots and he is less likely to read the _Daily Worker_. Also
there is a nasty Y.M.C.A. atmosphere about these places which you can
feel as soon as you go in. The unemployed men who frequent them are
mostly of the cap-touching type--the type who tells you oilily that he
is 'Temperance' and votes Conservative. Yet even here you feel yourself
torn both ways. For probably it is better that a man should waste his
time even with such rubbish as sea-grass work than that for years upon
end he should do absolutely _nothing_.
By far the best work for the unemployed is being done by the
N.U.W.M.--National Unemployed Workers' Movement. This is a revolutionary
organization intended to hold the unemployed together, stop them
blacklegging during strikes, and give them legal advice against the
Means Test. It is a movement that has been built out of nothing by the
pennies and efforts of the unemployed themselves. I have seen a good
deal of the N.U.W.M., and I greatly admire the men, ragged and underfed
like the others, who keep the organization going. Still more I admire
the tact and patience with which they do it; for it is not easy to coax
even a penny-a-week subscription out of the pockets of people on the
P.A.C. As I said earlier, the English working class do not show much
capacity for leadership, but they have a wonderful talent for
organization. The whole trade union movement testifies to this; so do
the excellent working-men's clubs--really a sort of glorified
cooperative pub, and splendidly organized--which are so common in
Yorkshire. In many towns the N.U.W.M. have shelters and arrange speeches
by Communist speakers. But even at these shelters the men who go there
do nothing but sit round the stove and occasionally play a game of
dominoes. If this move-met could be combined with something along the
lines of the occupational centres, it would be nearer what is needed. It
is a deadly thing to see a skilled man running to seed, year after year,
in utter, hopeless idleness. It ought not to be impossible to give him
the chance of using his hands and making furniture and so forth for his
own home, with-out turning him into a Y.M.C.A. cocoa-drunkard. We may as
well face the fact that several million men in England will--unless
another war breaks out--never have a real job this side the grave. One
thing that probably could be done and certainly ought to be done as a
matter of course is to give every unemployed man a patch of ground and
free tools if he chose to apply for them. It is disgraceful that men who
are expected to keep alive on the P.A.C. should not even have the chance
to grow vegetables for their families.
To study unemployment and its effects you have got to go to the
industrial areas. In the South unemployment exists, but it is scattered
and queerly unobtrusive. There are plenty of rural districts where a man
out of work is almost unheard-of, and you don't anywhere see the
spectacle of whole blocks of cities living on the dole and the P.A.C. It
is only when you lodge in streets where nobody has a job, where getting
a job seems about as probable as owning an aeroplane and much _less_
probable than winning fifty pounds in the Football Pool, that you begin
to grasp the changes that are being worked in our civilization. For a
change is taking place, there is no doubt about that. The attitude of
the submerged working class is profoundly different from what it was
seven or eight years ago.
I first became aware of the unemployment problem in 1928. At that time I
had just come back from Burma, where unemployment was only a word, and I
had gone to Burma when I was still a boy and the post-war boom was not
quite over. When I first saw unemployed men at close quarters, the thing
that horrified and amazed me was to find that many of them were
_ashamed_ of being unemployed. I was very ignorant, but not so ignorant
as to imagine that when the loss of foreign markets pushes two million
men out of work, those two million are any more to blame than the people
who draw blanks in the Calcutta Sweep. But at that time nobody cared to
admit that unemployment was inevitable, because this meant admitting
that it would probably continue. The middle classes were still talking
about 'lazy idle loafers on the dole' and saying that 'these men could
all find work if they wanted to', and naturally these opinions
percolated to the working class themselves. I remember the shock of
astonishment it gave me, when I first mingled with tramps and beggars,
to find that a fair proportion, perhaps a quarter, of these beings whom
I had been taught to regard as cynical parasites, were decent young
miners and cotton-workers gazing at their destiny with the same sort of
dumb amazement as an animal in a trap. They simply could not understand
what was happening to them. They had been brought up to work, and
behold! it seemed as if they were never going to have the chance of
working again. In their circumstances it was inevitable, at first, that
they should be haunted by a feeling of personal degradation. That was
the attitude towards unemployment in those days: it was a disaster which
happened to _you_ as an individual and for which _you_ were to blame.
When a quarter of a million miners are unemployed, it is part of the
order of things that Alf Smith, a miner living in the back streets of
Newcastle, should be out of work. Alf Smith is merely one of the quarter
million, a statistical unit. But no human being finds it easy to regard
himself as a statistical unit. So long as Bert Jones across the street
is still at work, Alf Smith is bound to feel himself dishonoured and a
failure. Hence that frightful feeling of impotence and despair which is
almost the worst evil of unemployment--far worse than any hardship,
worse than the demoralization of enforced idleness, and Only less bad
than the physical degeneracy of Alf Smith's children, born on the P.A.C.
Everyone who saw Greenwood's play _Love on the Dole_ must remember that
dreadful moment when the poor, good, stupid working man beats on the
table and cries out, 'O God, send me some work!' This was not dramatic
exaggeration, it was a touch from life. That cry must have been uttered,
in almost those words, in tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of
thousands of English homes, during the past fifteen years.
But, I think not again--or at least, not so often. That is the real
point: people are ceasing to kick against the pricks. After all, even
the middle classes--yes, even the bridge dubs in the country towns--are
beginning to realize that there is such a thing as unemployment. The 'My
dear, I don't believe in all this nonsense about unemployment. Why, only
last week we wanted a man to weed the garden, and we simply couldn't get
one. They don't want to work, that's all it is!' which you heard at
every decent tea-table five years ago, is growing perceptibly less
frequent. As for the working class themselves, they have gained
immensely in economic knowledge. I believe that the _Daily Worker_ has
accomplished a great deal here: its influence is out of all proportion
to its circulation. But in any case they have had their lesson well
rubbed into them, not only because unemployment is so widespread but
because it has lasted so long. When people live on the dole for years at
a time they grow used to it, and drawing the dole, though it remains
unpleasant, ceases to be shameful. Thus the old, independent,
workhouse-fearing tradition is undermined, just as the ancient fear of
debt is undermined by the hire-purchase system. In the back streets of
Wigan and Barnsley I saw every kind of privation, but I probably saw
much less _conscious_ misery than I should have seen ten years ago. The
people have at any rate grasped that unemployment is a thing they cannot
help. It is not only Alf Smith who is out of work now; Bert Jones is out
of work as well, and both of them have been 'out' for years. It makes a
great deal of difference when things are the same for everybody.
So you have whole populations settling down, as it were, to a lifetime
on the P.A.C. And what I think is admirable, perhaps even hopeful, is
that they have managed to do it without going spiritually to pieces. A
working man does not disintegrate under the strain of poverty as a
middle-class person does. Take, for instance, the fact that the working
class think nothing of getting married on the dole. It annoys the old
ladies in Brighton, but it is a proof of their essential good sense;
they realize that losing your job does not mean that you cease to be a
human being. So that in one way things in the distressed areas are not
as bad as they might be. Life is still fairly normal, more normal than
one really has the right to expect. Families are impoverished, but the
family-system has not broken up. The people are in effect living a
reduced version of their former lives. Instead of raging against their
destiny they have made things tolerable by lowering their standards.
But they don't necessarily lower their standards by cutting I out
luxuries and concentrating on necessities; more often it is the other
way about--the more natural way, if you come to think of it. Hence the
fact that in a decade of unparalleled depression, the consumption of all
cheap luxuries has in-creased. The two things that have probably made
the greatest difference of all are the movies and the mass-production of
cheap smart clothes since the war. The youth who leaves school at
fourteen and gets a blind-alley job is out of work at twenty, probably
for life; but for two pounds ten on the hire-purchase he can buy himself
a suit which, for a little while and at a little distance, looks as
though it had been tailored in Savile Row. The girl can look like a
fashion plate at an even lower price. You may have three halfpence in
your pocket and not a prospect in the world, and only the corner of a
leaky bedroom to go home to; but in your new clothes you can stand on
the street corner, indulging in a private daydream of yourself as dark
Gable or Greta Garbo, which compensates you for a great deal. And even
at home there is generally a cup of tea going--a 'nice cup of tea'--and
Father, who has been out of work since 1929, is temporarily happy
because he has a sure tip for the Cesarewitch.
Trade since the war has had to adjust itself to meet the demands of
underpaid, underfed people, with the result that a luxury is nowadays
almost always cheaper than a necessity. One pair of plain solid shoes
costs as much as two ultra-smart pairs. For the price of one square meal
you can get two pounds of cheap sweets. You can't get much meat for
threepence, but you can get a lot offish-and-chips. Milk costs
threepence a pint and even 'mild' beer costs fourpence, but aspirins are
seven a penny and you can wring forty cups of tea out of a quarter-pound
packet. And above all there is gambling, the cheapest of all luxuries.
Even people on the verge of starvation can buy a few days' hope
('Something to live for', as they call it) by having a penny on a
sweepstake. Organized gambling has now risen almost to the status of a
major industry. Consider, for instance, a phenomenon like the Football
Pools, with a turnover of about six million pounds a year, almost all of
it from the pockets of working-class people. I happened to be in
Yorkshire when Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland. Hitler, Locarno,
Fascism, and the threat of war aroused hardly a flicker of interest
locally, but the decision of the Football Association to stop publishing
their fixtures in advance (this was an attempt to quell the Football
Pools) flung all Yorkshire into a storm of fury. And then there is the
queer spectacle of modern electrical science showering miracles upon
people with empty bellies. You may shiver all night for lack of
bedclothes, but in the morning you can go to the public library and read
the news that has been telegraphed for your benefit from San Francisco
and Singapore. Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone
in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have
gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been
plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by
cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life.
Do you consider all this desirable? No, I don't. But it may be that the
psychological adjustment which the working class are visibly making is
the best they could make in the circumstances. They have neither turned
revolutionary nor lost their self-respect; merely they have kept their
tempers and settled down to make the best of things on a fish-and-chip
standard. The alternative would be God knows what continued agonies of
despair; or it might be attempted insurrections which, in a strongly
governed country like England, could only lead to futile massacres and a
regime of savage repression.
Of course the post-war development of cheap luxuries has been a very
fortunate thing for our rulers. It is quite likely that fish-and-chips,
art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce
bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea, and the Football
Pools have between them averted revolution. Therefore we are some-times
told that the whole thing is an astute manoeuvre by the governing
class--a sort of 'bread and circuses' business--to hold the unemployed
down. What I have seen of our governing class does not convince me that
they have that much intelligence. The thing has happened, but by an
un-conscious process--the quite natural interaction between the
manufacturer's need for a market and the need of half-starved people for
cheap palliatives.
6
When I was a small boy at school a lecturer used to come once a term and
deliver excellent lectures on famous battles of the past, such as
Blenheim, Austerlitz, etc. He was fond of quoting Napoleon's maxim 'An
army marches on its stomach', and at the end of his lecture he would
suddenly turn to us and demand, 'What's the most important thing in the
world?' We were expected to shout 'Food!' and if we did not do so he was
disappointed.
Obviously he was right in a way. A human being is primarily a bag for
putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more
godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is
buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has
eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I
think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more
important than changes of dynasty or even of religion. The Great War,
for instance, could never have happened if tinned food had not been
invented. And the history of the past four hundred years in England
would have been immensely different if it had not been for the
introduction of root-crops and various other vegetables at the end of
the Middle Ages, and a little later the introduction of non-alcoholic
drinks (tea, coffee, cocoa) and also of distilled liquors to which the
beer-drinking English were not accustomed. Yet it is curious how seldom
the all-importance of food is recognized. You see statues everywhere to
politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or
market-gardeners. The Emperor Charles V is said to have erected a statue
to the inventor of bloaters, but that is the only case I can think of at
the moment.
So perhaps the really important thing about the unemployed, the really
basic thing if you look to the future, is the diet they are living on.
As I said earlier, the average unemployed family lives on an income of
round about thirty shillings a week, of which at least a quarter goes in
rent. It is worth considering in some detail how the remaining money is
spent. I have here a budget which was made out for me by an unemployed
miner and his wife. I asked them to make a list which represented as
exactly as possible their expenditure in a typical week. This man's
allowance was thirty-two shillings a week, and besides his wife he had
two children, one aged two years and five months and the other ten
months. Here is the list:
s. d.
Rent 9 0 1/2
Clothing Club 3 0
Coal 2 0
Gas 1 3
Milk 0 10 1/2
Union Fees 0 3
Insurance (on the children) 0 2
Meat 2 6
Flour (2 stone) 3 4
Yeast 0 4
Potatoes 1 0
Dripping 0 10
Margarine 0 10
Bacon 1 2
Sugar 1 9
Tea 1 0
Jam 0 7 1/2
Peas and cabbage 0 6
Carrots and onions 0 4
Quaker oats 0 4 1/2
Soap, powders, blue, etc. 0 10
--------
Total £1 12 0
-------
In addition to this, three packets of dried milk were sup-plied weekly
for the baby by the Infants' Welfare Clinic. One or two comments are
needed here. To begin with the list leaves out a great deal--blacking,
pepper, salt, vinegar, matches, kindling-wood, razor blades,
replacements of utensils, and wear and tear of furniture and bedding, to
name the first few that come to mind. Any money spent on these would
mean reduction on some other item. A more serious charge is tobacco.
This man happened to be a small smoker, but even so his tobacco would
hardly cost less than a shilling a week, meaning a further reduction on
food. The 'clothing clubs' into which unemployed people pay so much a
week are run by big drapers in all the industrial towns. Without them it
would be impossible for unemployed people to buy new clothes at all. I
don't know whether or not they buy bedding through these clubs. This
particular family, as I happen to know, possessed next to no bedding.
In the above list, if you allow a shilling for tobacco and deduct this
and the other non-food items, you are left with sixteen and fivepence
halfpenny. Call it sixteen shillings and leave the baby out of
account--for the baby was getting its weekly packets of milk from the
Welfare Clinic. This sixteen shillings has got to provide the entire
nourishment, _including fuel_, of three persons, two of them adult. The
first question is whether it is even theoretically possible for three
persons to be properly nourished on sixteen shillings a week. When the
dispute over the Means Test was in progress there was a disgusting
public wrangle about the minimum weekly sum on which a human being could
keep alive. So far as I remember, one school of dietitians worked it out
at five and ninepence, while another school, more generous, put it at
five and ninepence halfpenny. After this there were letters to the
papers from a number of people who claimed to be feeding themselves on
four shillings a week. Here is a weekly budget (it was printed in the
_New Statesman_ and also in the _News of the World_) which I picked out
from among a number of others:
s. d.
3 wholemeal loaves 1 0
1/2 lb. margarine 0 2 1/2
1/2 lb. dripping 0 3
1 lb. cheese 0 7
1 lb. onions 0 1 1/2
1 lb. carrots 0 1 1/2
1 lb. broken biscuits 0 4
2 lb. dates 0 6
1 tin evaporated milk 0 5
10 oranges 0 5
----
Total 3 11 1/2
----
Please notice that this budget contains _nothing for fuel_. In fact, the
writer explicitly stated that he could not afford to buy fuel and ate
all his food raw. Whether the letter was genuine or a hoax does not
matter at the moment. What I think will be admitted is that this list
represents about as wise an expenditure as could be contrived; if you
_had_ to live on three and elevenpence halfpenny a week, you could
hardly extract more food-value from it than that. So perhaps it is
possible to feed yourself adequately on the P.A.C. allowance if you
concentrate on essential foodstuffs; but not otherwise.
Now compare this list with the unemployed miner's budget that I gave
earlier. The miner's family spend only tenpence a week on green
vegetables and tenpence half-penny on milk (remember that one of them is
a child less than three years old), and nothing on fruit; but they spend
one and nine on sugar (about eight pounds of sugar, that is) and a
shilling on tea. The half-crown spent on meat _might_ represent a small
joint and the materials for a stew; probably as often as not it would
represent four or five tins of bully beef. The basis of their diet,
therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and
potatoes--an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more
money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they
even, like the writer of the letter to the _New Statesman_, saved on
fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no
ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary
human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw
carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have,
the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire
may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an
unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of
the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to
say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't
want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit
'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let's
have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream!
Put the kettle on and we'll all have a nice cup of tea! _That_ is how
your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg
and sugared tea don't nourish you to any extent, but they are _nicer_
(at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold
water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly
palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man's opium. A cup of
tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a
crust of brown bread.
The results of all this are visible in a physical degeneracy which you
can study directly, by using your eyes, or inferentially, by having a
look at the vital statistics. The physical average in the industrial
towns is terribly low, lower even than in London. In Sheffield you have
the feeling of walking among a population of troglodytes. The miners are
splendid men, but they are usually small, and the mere fact that their
muscles are toughened by constant work does not mean that their children
start life with a better physique. In any case the miners are physically
the pick of the population. The most obvious sign of under-nourishment
is the badness of everybody's teeth. In Lancashire you would have to
look for a long time before you saw a working-class person with good
natural teeth. Indeed, you see very few people with natural teeth at
all, apart from the children; and even the children's teeth have a frail
bluish appearance which means, I suppose, calcium deficiency. Several
dentists have told me that in industrial districts a person over thirty
with any of his or her own teeth is coming to be an abnormality. In
Wigan various people gave me their opinion that it is best to get shut
of your teeth as early in life as possible. 'Teeth is just a misery,'
one woman said to me. In one house where I stayed there were, apart from
myself, five people, the oldest being forty-three and the youngest a boy
of fifteen. Of these the boy was the only one who possessed a single
tooth of his own, and his teeth were obviously not going to last long.
As for the vital statistics, the fact that in any large industrial town
the death rate and infant mortality of the poorest quarters are always
about double those of the well-to-do residential quarters--a good deal
more than double in some cases--hardly needs commenting on.
Of course one ought not to imagine that the prevailing bad physique is
due solely to unemployment, for it is probable that the physical average
has been declining all over England for a long time past, and not merely
among the unemployed in the industrial areas. This cannot be proved
statistically, but it is a conclusion that is forced upon you if you use
your eyes, even in rural places and even in a prosperous town like
London. On the day when King George V's body passed through London on
its way to Westminster, I happened to be caught for an hour or two in
the crowd in Trafalgar Square. It was impossible, looking about one
then, not to be struck by the physical degeneracy of modern England. The
people surrounding me were _not_ working-class people for the most part;
they were the shopkeeper--commercial-traveller type, with a sprinkling
of the well-to-do. But what a set they looked! Puny limbs, sickly faces,
under the weeping London sky! Hardly a well-built man or a
decent-looking woman, and not a fresh complexion anywhere. As the King's
coffin went by, the men took off their hats, and a friend who was in the
crowd at the other side of the Strand said to me afterwards, 'The only
touch of colour anywhere was the bald heads.' Even the Guards, it seemed
to me--there was a squad of guardsmen marching beside the coffin--were
not what they used to be. Where are the monstrous men with chests like
barrels and moustaches like the wings of eagles who strode across my
child-hood's gaze twenty or thirty years ago? Buried, I suppose, in the
Flanders mud. In their place there are these pale-faced boys who have
been picked for their height and consequently look like hop-poles in
overcoats--the truth being that in modern England a man over six feet
high is usually skin and bone and not much else. If the English physique
has declined, this is no doubt partly due to the fact that the Great War
carefully selected the million best men in England and slaughtered them,
largely before they had had time to breed. But the process must have
begun earlier than that, and it must be due ultimately to un-healthy
ways of living, i.e. to industrialism. I don't mean 'the habit of living
in towns--probably the town is healthier than the country, in many
ways--but the modern industrial technique which provides you with cheap
substitutes for everything. We may find in the long run that tinned food
is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun.
It is unfortunate that the English working class--the English nation
generally, for that matter--are exception-ally ignorant about and
wasteful of food. I have pointed out elsewhere how civilized is a French
navvy's idea of a meal compared with an Englishman's, and I cannot
believe that you would ever see such wastage in a French house as you
habitually see in English ones. Of course, in the very poorest homes,
where everybody is unemployed, you don't see much actual waste, but
those who can afford to waste food often do so. I could give startling
instances of this. Even the Northern habit of baking one's own bread is
slightly wasteful in itself, because an overworked woman cannot bake
more than once or, at most, twice a week and it is impossible to tell
beforehand how much bread will be wasted, so that a certain amount
generally has to be thrown away. The usual thing is to bake six large
loaves and twelve small ones at a time. All this is part of the old,
generous English attitude to life, and it is an amiable quality, but a
disastrous one at the present moment.
English working people everywhere, so far as I know, refuse brown bread;
it is usually impossible to buy whole-meal bread in a working-class
district. They sometimes give the reason that brown bread is 'dirty'. I
suspect the real reason is that in the past brown bread has been
confused with black bread, which is traditionally associated with Popery
and wooden shoes. (They have plenty of Popery and wooden shoes in
Lancashire. A pity they haven't the black bread as well!) But the
English palate, especially the working-class palate, now rejects good
food almost automatically. The number of people who prefer tinned peas
and tinned fish to real peas and real fish must be increasing every
year, and plenty of people who could afford real milk in their tea would
much sooner have tinned milk--even that dreadful tinned milk which is
made of sugar and corn-flour and has UNFIT FOR BABIES on the tin in huge
letters. In some districts efforts are now being made to teach the
unemployed more about food-values and more about the intelligent
spending of money. When you hear of a thing like this you feel yourself
torn both ways. I have heard a Communist speaker on the platform grow
very angry about it. In London, he said, parties of Society dames now
have the cheek to walk into East End houses and give shopping-lessons to
the wives of the unemployed. He gave this as an instance of the
mentality of the English governing class. First you condemn a family to
live on thirty shillings a week, and then you have the damned
impertinence to tell them how they are to spend their money. He was
quite right--I agree heartily. Yet all the same it is a pity that,
merely for the lack of a proper tradition, people should pour muck like
tinned milk down their throats and not even know that it is inferior to
the product of the cow.
I doubt, however, whether the unemployed would ultimately benefit if
they learned to spend their money more economically. For it is only the
fact that they are _not_ economical that keeps their allowances so high.
An English-man on the P.A.C. gets fifteen shillings a week because
fifteen shillings is the smallest sum on which he can conceivably keep
alive. If he were, say, an Indian or Japanese coolie, who can live on
rice and onions, he wouldn't get fifteen shillings a week--he would be
lucky if he got fifteen shillings a month. Our unemployment allowances,
miser-able though they are, are framed to suit a population with very
high standards and not much notion of economy. If the unemployed learned
to be better managers they would be visibly better off, and I fancy it
would not be long before the dole was docked correspondingly.
There is one great mitigation of unemployment in the North, and that is
the cheapness of fuel. Anywhere in the coal areas the retail price of
coal is about one and sixpence a hundredweight; in the South of England
it is about half a crown. Moreover, miners in work can usually buy coal
direct from the pit at eight or nine shillings a ton, and those who have
a cellar in their homes sometimes store a ton and sell it (illicitly, I
suppose) to those who are out of work. But apart from this there is
immense and systematic thieving of coal by the unemployed. I call it
thieving because technically it is that, though it does no harm to
anybody. In the 'dirt' that is sent up from the pits there is a certain
amount of broken coal, and unemployed people spend a lot of time in
picking it out of the slag-heaps. All day long over those strange grey
mountains you see people wandering to and fro with sacks and baskets
across the sulphurous smoke (many slag-heaps are on fire under the
surface), prising out the tiny nuggets of coal which are buried here and
there. You meet men coming away, wheeling strange and wonderful
home-made bicycles--bicycles made of rusty parts picked off refuse-tips,
without saddles, without chains and almost always without tyres--across
which are slung bags containing perhaps half a hundredweight of coal,
fruit of half a day's searching. In times of strikes, when everybody is
short of fuel, the miners turn out with pick and shovel and burrow into
the slag-heaps, whence the hummocky appearance which most slag-heaps
have. During long strikes, in places where there are outcrops of coal,
they have sunk surface mines and carried them scores of yards into the
earth.
In Wigan the competition among unemployed people for the waste coal has
become so fierce that it has led to an extraordinary custom called'
scrambling for the coal', which is well worth seeing. Indeed I rather
wonder that it has never been filmed. An unemployed miner took me to see
it one afternoon. We got to the place, a mountain range of ancient
slag-heaps with a railway running through the valley below. A couple of
hundred ragged men, each with a sack and coal-hammer strapped under his
coat-tails, were waiting on the 'broo'. When the dirt comes up-from the
pit it is loaded on to trucks and an engine runs these to the top of
another slag-heap a quarter of a mile away and there leaves them. The
process of 'scrambling for the coal' consists in getting on to the train
while it is moving; any truck which you have succeeded in boarding while
it is in motion counts as 'your' truck. Presently the train hove in
sight. With a wild yell a hundred men dashed down the slope to catch her
as she rounded the bend. Even at the bend the train was making twenty
miles an hour. The men hurled themselves upon it, caught hold of the
rings at the rear of the trucks and hoisted themselves up by way of the
bumpers, five or ten of them on each truck. The driver took no notice,
He drove up to the top of the slag-heap, uncoupled the trucks, and ran
the engine back to the pit, presently returning with a fresh string of
trucks. There was the same wild rush of ragged figures as before. In the
end only about fifty men had failed to get on to either train.
We walked up to the top of the slag-heap. The men were shovelling the
dirt out of the trucks, while down below their wives and children were
kneeling, swiftly scrabbling with their hands in the damp dirt and
picking out lumps of coal the size of an egg or smaller. You would see a
woman pounce on a tiny fragment of stuff, wipe it on her apron,
scrutinize it to make sure it was coal, and pop it jealously into her
sack. Of course, when you are boarding a truck you don't know beforehand
what is in it; it may be actual 'dirt' from the roads or it may merely
be shale from the roofing. If it is a shale truck there will be no coal
in it, but there occurs among the shale another inflammable rock called
cannel, which looks very like ordinary shale but is slightly darker and
is known by splitting in parallel lines, like slate. It makes tolerable
fuel, not good enough to be commercially valuable, but good enough to be
eagerly sought after by the unemployed. The miners on the shale trucks
were picking out the cannel and splitting it up with their hammers. Down
at the bottom of the 'broo' the people who had failed to get on to
either train were gleaning the tiny chips of coal that came rolling down
from above--fragments no bigger than a hazel-nut, these, but the people
were glad enough to get them.
We stayed there till the train was empty. In a couple of hours the
people had picked the dirt over to the last grain. They slung their
sacks over shoulder or bicycle, and started on the two-mile trudge back
to Wigan. Most of the families had gathered about half a hundredweight
of coal or cannel, so that between them they must have stolen five or
ten tons of fuel. This business of robbing the dirt trains takes place
every day in Wigan, at any rate in winter, and at more collieries than
one. It is of course extremely dangerous. No one was hurt the afternoon
I was there, but a man had had both his legs cut off a few weeks
earlier, and another man lost several fingers a week later. Technically
it is stealing but, as everybody knows, if the coal were not stolen it
would simply be wasted. Now and again, for form's sake, the colliery
companies prosecute somebody for coal-picking, and in that morning's
issue of the local paper there was a paragraph saying that two men had
been fined ten shillings. But no notice is taken of the prosecutions--in
fact, one of the men named in the paper was there that afternoon--and
the coal-pickers subscribe among themselves to pay the fines. The thing
is taken for granted. Everyone knows that the unemployed have got to get
fuel somehow. So every afternoon several hundred men risk their necks
and several hundred women scrabble in the mud for hours--and all for
half a hundredweight of inferior fuel, value ninepence.
That scene stays in my mind as one of my pictures of Lancashire: the
dumpy, shawled women, with their sacking aprons and their heavy black
clogs, kneeling in the cindery mud and the bitter wind, searching
eagerly for tiny chips of coal. They are glad enough to do it. In winter
they are desperate for fuel; it is more important almost than food.
Meanwhile all round, as far as the eye can see, are the slag-heaps and
hoisting gear of collieries, and not one of those collieries can sell
all the coal it is capable of producing. This ought to appeal to Major
Douglas.
7
As you travel northward your eye, accustomed to the South or East, does
not notice much difference until you are beyond Birmingham. In Coventry
you might as well be in Finsbury Park, and the Bull Ring in Birmingham
is not unlike Norwich Market, and between all the towns of the Midlands
there stretches a villa-civilization indistinguishable from that of the
South. It is only when you get a little further north, to the pottery
towns and beyond, that you begin to encounter the real ugliness of
industrialism--an ugliness so frightful and so arresting that you are
obliged, as it were, to come to terms with it.
A slag-heap is at best a hideous thing, because it is so planless and
functionless. It is something just dumped on the earth, like the
emptying of a giant's dust-bin. On the outskirts of the mining towns
there are frightful landscapes where your horizon is ringed completely
round by jagged grey mountains, and underfoot is mud and ashes and
over-head the steel cables where tubs of dirt travel slowly across miles
of country. Often the slag-heaps are on fire, and at night you can see
the red rivulets of fire winding this way and that, and also the
slow-moving blue flames of sulphur, which always seem on the point of
expiring and always spring out again. Even when a slag-heap sinks, as it
does ultimately, only an evil brown grass grows on it, and it retains
its hummocky surface. One in the slums of Wigan, used as a playground,
looks like a choppy sea suddenly frozen; 'the flock mattress', it is
called locally. Even centuries hence when the plough drives over the
places where coal was once mined, the sites of ancient slag-heaps will
still be distinguishable from an aeroplane.
I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All
round was the lunar landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north, through
the passes, as it were, between the mountains of slag, you could see the
factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke. The canal path was a
mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the imprints of
innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag-heaps in the
distance, stretched the 'flashes'--pools of stagnant water that had
seeped into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. It was
horribly cold. The 'flashes' were covered with ice the colour of raw
umber, the bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock gates
wore beards of ice. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been
banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul
water. But even Wigan is beautiful compared with Sheffield. Sheffield, I
suppose, could justly claim to be called the ugliest town in the Old
World: its inhabitants, who want it to be pre-eminent in everything,
very likely do make that claim for it. It has a population of half a
million and it contains fewer decent buildings than the average East
Anglian village of five hundred. And the stench! If at rare moments you
stop smelling sulphur it is because you have begun smelling gas. Even
the shallow river that runs through the town is-usually bright yellow
with some chemical or other. Once I halted in the street and counted the
factory chimneys I could see; there were thirty-three of them, but there
would have been far more if the air had not been obscured by smoke. One
scene especially lingers in my mind. A frightful patch of waste ground
(somehow, up there, a patch of waste ground attains a squalor that would
be impossible even in London) trampled bare of grass and littered with
newspapers and old saucepans. To the right an isolated row of gaunt
four-roomed houses, dark red, blackened by smoke. To the left an
interminable vista of factory chimneys, chimney beyond chimney, fading
away into a dim blackish haze. Behind me a railway embankment made of
the slag from furnaces. In front, across the patch of waste ground, a
cubical building of red and yellow brick, with the sign 'Thomas Grocock,
Haulage Contractor'.
At night, when you cannot see the hideous shapes of the houses and the
blackness of everything, a town like Sheffield assumes a kind of
sinister magnificence. Sometimes the drifts of smoke are rosy with
sulphur, and serrated flames, like circular saws, squeeze themselves out
from beneath the cowls of the foundry chimneys. Through the open doors
of foundries you see fiery serpents of iron being hauled to and fro by
redlit boys, and you hear the whizz and thump of steam hammers and the
scream of the iron under the blow. The pottery towns are almost equally
ugly in a pettier way. Right in among the rows of tiny blackened houses,
part of the street as it were, are the 'pot banks'--conical brick
chimneys like gigantic burgundy bottles buried in the soil and belching
their smoke almost in your face. You come upon monstrous clay chasms
hundreds of feet across and almost as deep, with little rusty tubs
creeping on chain railways up one side, and on the other workmen
clinging like samphire-gatherers and cutting into the face of the cliff
with their picks. I passed that way in snowy weather, and even the snow
was black. The best thing one can say for the pottery towns is that they
are fairly small and stop abruptly. Less than ten miles away you can
stand in un-defiled country, on the almost naked hills, and the pottery
towns are only a smudge in the distance.
When you contemplate such ugliness as this, there are two questions that
strike you. First, is it inevitable? Secondly, does it matter?
I do not believe that there is anything inherently and unavoidably ugly
about industrialism. A factory or even a gasworks is not obliged of its
own nature to be ugly, any more than a palace or a dog-kennel or a
cathedral. It all depends on the architectural tradition of the period.
The industrial towns of the North are ugly because they happen to have
been built at a time when modern methods of steel-construction and
smoke-abatement were unknown, and when everyone was too busy making
money to think about anything else. They go on being ugly largely
because the Northerners have got used to that kind of thing and do not
notice it. Many of the people in Sheffield or Manchester, if they
smelled the air along the Cornish cliffs, would probably declare that it
had no taste in it. But since the war, industry has tended to shift
southward and in doing so has grown almost comely. The typical post-war
factory is not a gaunt barrack or an awful chaos of blackness and
belching chimneys; it is a glittering white structure of concrete,
glass, and steel, surrounded by green lawns and beds of tulips. Look at
the factories you pass as you travel out of London on the G.W.R.; they
may not be aesthetic triumphs but certainly they are not ugly in the
same way as the Sheffield gasworks. But in any case, though the ugliness
of industrialism is the most obvious thing about it and the thing every
newcomer exclaims against, I doubt whether it is centrally important.
And perhaps it is not even desirable, industrialism being what it is,
that it should learn to disguise itself as something else. As Mr Aldous
Huxley has truly remarked, a dark Satanic mill ought to look like a dark
Satanic mill and not like the temple of mysterious and splendid gods.
Moreover, even in the worst of the industrial towns one sees a great
deal that is not ugly in the narrow aesthetic sense. A belching chimney
or a stinking slum is repulsive chiefly because it implies warped lives
and ailing children. Look at it from a purely aesthetic standpoint and
it may, have a certain macabre appeal. I find that anything outrageously
strange generally ends by fascinating me even when I abominate it. The
landscapes of Burma, which, when I was among them, so appalled me as to
assume the qualities of nightmare, afterwards stayed so hauntingly in my
mind that I was obliged to write a novel about them to get rid of them.
(In all novels about the East the scenery is the real subject-matter.)
It would probably be quite easy to extract a sort of beauty, as Arnold
Bennett did, from the blackness of the industrial towns; one can easily
imagine Baudelaire, for instance, writing a poem about a slag-heap. But
the beauty or ugliness of industrialism hardly matters. Its real evil
lies far deeper and is quite uneradicable. It is important to remember
this, because there is always a temptation to think that industrialism
is harmless so long as it is clean and orderly.
But when you go to the industrial North you are conscious, quite apart
from the unfamiliar scenery, of entering a strange country. This is
partly because of certain real differences which do exist, but still
more because of the North-South antithesis which has been rubbed into us
for such a long time past. There exists in England a curious cult of
Northernness, sort of Northern snobbishness. A Yorkshireman in the South
will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an
inferior. If you ask him why, he will explain that it is only in the
North that life is 'real' life, that the industrial work done in the
North is the only 'real' work, that the North is inhabited by 'real'
people, the South merely by rentiers and their parasites. The Northerner
has 'grit', he is grim, 'dour', plucky, warm-hearted, and democratic;
the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate, and lazy--that at any rate is
the theory. Hence the Southerner goes north, at any rate for the first
time, with the vague inferiority-complex of a civilized man venturing
among savages, while the Yorkshireman, like the Scotchman, comes to
London in the spirit of a barbarian out for loot. And feelings of this
kind, which are the result of tradition, are not affected by visible
facts. Just as an Englishman five feet four inches high and twenty-nine
inches round the chest feels that as an Englishman he is the physical
superior of Carnera (Carnera being a Dago), so also with the Northerner
and the Southerner. I remember a weedy little Yorkshireman, who would
almost certainly have run away if a fox-terrier had snapped at him,
telling me that in the South of England he felt 'like a wild invader'.
But the cult is often adopted by people who are not by birth Northerners
themselves. A year or two ago a friend of mine, brought up in the South
but now living in the North, was driving me through Suffolk in a car. We
passed through a rather beautiful village. He glanced disapprovingly at
the cottages and said:
'Of course most of the villages in Yorkshire are hideous; but the
Yorkshiremen are splendid chaps. Down here it's just the other way
about--beautiful villages and rotten people. All the people in those
cottages there are worthless, absolutely worthless.'
I could not help inquiring whether he happened to know anybody in that
village. No, he did not know them; but because this was East Anglia they
were obviously worthless. Another friend of mine, again a Southerner by
birth, loses no opportunity of praising the North to the detriment of
the South. Here is an extract from one of his letters to me:
I am in Clitheroe, Lancs...I think running water is much more
attractive in moor and mountain country than in the fat and sluggish
South. 'The smug and silver Trent,' Shakespeare says; and the South-er
the smugger, I say.
Here you have an interesting example of the Northern cult. Not only are
you and I and everyone else in the South of England written off as 'fat
and sluggish', but even water when it gets north of a certain latitude,
ceases to be H2O and becomes something mystically superior. But the
interest of this passage is that its writer is an extremely intelligent
man of 'advanced' opinions who would have nothing but con-tempt for
nationalism in its ordinary form. Put to him some such proposition as
'One Britisher is worth three foreigners', and he would repudiate it
with horror. But when it is a question of North versus South, he is
quite ready to generalize. _All_ nationalistic distinctions--all claims
to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped
skull or speak a different dialect--are entirely spurious, but they are
important so long as people believe in them. There is no doubt about the
Englishman's inbred conviction that those who live to the south of him
are his inferiors; even our foreign policy is governed by it to some
extent. I think, therefore, that it is worth pointing out when and why
it came into being.
When nationalism first became a religion, the English looked at the map,
and, noticing that their island lay very high in the Northern
Hemisphere, evolved the pleasing theory that the further north you live
the more virtuous you become. The histories I was given when I was a
little boy generally started off by explaining in the naivest way that a
cold climate made people energetic while a hot one made them lazy, and
hence the defeat of the Spanish Armada. This nonsense about the superior
energy of the English (actually the laziest people in Europe) has been
current for at least a hundred years. 'Better is it for us', writes a
Quarterly Reviewer of 1827, 'to be condemned to labour for our country's
good than to luxuriate amid olives, vines, and vices.' 'Olives, vines,
and vices' sums up the normal English attitude towards the Latin races.
In the mythology of Carlyle, Creasey, etc., the Northerner ('Teutonic',
later 'Nordic') is pictured as a hefty, vigorous chap with blond
moustaches and pure morals, while the Southerner is sly, cowardly, and
licentious. This theory was never pushed to its logical end, which would
have meant assuming that the finest people in the world were the
Eskimos, but it did involve admitting that the people who lived to the
north of us were superior to ourselves. Hence, partly, the cult of
Scotland and of Scotch things which has so deeply marked English life
during the past fifty years. But it was the industrialization of the
North that gave the North-South antithesis its peculiar slant. Until
comparatively recently the northern part of England was the backward and
feudal part, and such industry as existed was concentrated in London and
the South-East. In the Civil War for instance, roughly speaking a war of
money versus feudalism, the North and West were for the King and the
South and East for the Parliament. But with the increasing use of coal
industry passed to the North, and there grew up a new type of man, the
self-made Northern business man--the Mr Rouncewell and Mr Bounderby of
Dickens. The Northern business man, with his hateful 'get on or get out'
philosophy, was the dominant figure of the nineteenth century, and as a
sort of tyrannical corpse he rules us still. This is the type edified by
Arnold Bennett--the type who starts off with half a crown and ends up
with fifty thousand pounds, and whose chief pride is to be an even
greater boor after he has made his money than before. On analysis his
sole virtue turns out to be a talent for making money. We were bidden to
admire him because though he might be narrow-minded, sordid, ignorant,
grasping, and uncouth, he had 'grit', he 'got on'; in other words, he
knew how to make money.
This kind of cant is nowadays a pure anachronism, for the Northern
business man is no longer prosperous. But traditions are not killed by
facts, and the tradition of Northern' grit' lingers. It is still dimly
felt that a Northerner will 'get on', i.e. make money, where a
Southerner will fail. At the back of the mind of every Yorkshireman and
every Scotchman who comes to London is a sort of Dick Whittington
picture of himself as the boy who starts off by selling newspapers and
ends up as Lord Mayor. And that, really, is at the bottom of his
bumptiousness. But where one can make a great mistake is in imagining
that this feeling extends to the genuine working class. When I first
went to Yorkshire, some years ago, I imagined that I was going to a
country of boors. I was used to the London Yorkshireman with his
interminable harangues and his pride in the sup-posed raciness of his
dialect ('"A stitch in time saves nine", as we say in the West
Riding'), and I expected to meet with a good deal of rudeness. But I met
with nothing of the kind, and least of all among the miners. Indeed the
Lancashire and Yorkshire miners treated me with a kindness and courtesy
that were even embarrassing; for if there is one type of man to whom I
do feel myself inferior, it is a coal-miner. Certainly no one showed any
sign of despising me for coming from a different part of the country.
This has its importance when one remembers that the English regional
snobberies are nationalism in miniature; for it suggests that
place-snobbery is not a working-class characteristic.
There is nevertheless a real difference between North and South, and
there is at least a tinge of truth in that picture of Southern England
as one enormous Brighton inhabited by lounge-lizards. For climatic
reasons the parasitic dividend-drawing class tend to settle in the
South. In a Lancashire cotton-town you could probably go for months on
end without once hearing an 'educated' accent, whereas there can hardly
be a town in the South of England where you could throw a brick without
hitting the niece of a bishop. Consequently, with no petty gentry to set
the pace, the bourgeoisification of the working class, though it is
taking place in the North, is taking place more slowly. All the Northern
accents, for instance, persist strongly, while the Southern ones are
collapsing before the movies and the B.B.C. Hence your 'educated' accent
stamps you rather as a foreigner than as a chunk of the petty gentry;
and this is an immense advantage, for it makes it much easier to get
into contact with the working class.
But is it ever possible to be really intimate with the working class? I
shall have to discuss that later; I will only say here that I do not
think it is possible. But undoubtedly it is easier in the North than it
would be in the South to meet working-class people on approximately
equal terms. It is fairly easy to live in a miner's house and be
accepted as one of the family; with, say, a farm labourer in the
Southern counties it probably would be impossible. I have seen just
enough of the working class to avoid idealizing them, but I do know that
you can learn a great deal in a working-class home, if only you can get
there. The essential point is that your middle-class ideals and
prejudices are tested by contact with others which are not necessarily
better but are certainly different.
Take for instance the different attitude towards the family. A
working-class family hangs together as a middle-class one does, but the
relationship is far less tyrannical. A working man has not that deadly
weight of family prestige hanging round his neck like a millstone. I
have pointed out earlier that a middle-class person goes utterly to
pieces under the influence of poverty; and this is generally due to the
behaviour of his family--to the fact that he has scores of relations
nagging and badgering him night and day for failing to 'get on'. The
fact that the working class know how to combine and the middle class
don't is probably due to their different conceptions of family loyalty.
You cannot have an effective trade union of middle-class workers,
be-cause in times of strikes almost every middle-class wife would be
egging her husband on to blackleg and get the other fellow's job.
Another working-class characteristic, disconcerting at first, is their
plain-spokenness towards anyone they regard as an equal. If you offer a
working man something he doesn't want, he tells you that he doesn't want
it; a middle-class person would accept it to avoid giving offence. And
again, take the working-class attitude towards 'education'. How
different it is from ours, and how immensely sounder! Working people
often have a vague reverence for learning in others, but where
'education' touches their own lives they see through it and reject it by
a healthy instinct. The time was when I used to lament over quite
imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their
lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that
the doom of a 'job' should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I
know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does
not pine for the day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing
real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and
geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school till
you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly. The idea
of a great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a week
home to his parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform and even
being caned for not doing his lessons! Just fancy a working-class boy of
eighteen allowing himself to be caned! He is a man when the other is
still a baby. Ernest Pontifex, in Samuel Butler's _Way of All Flesh_,
after he had had a few glimpses of real life, looked back on his public
school and university education and found it a 'sickly, debilitating
debauch'. There is much in middle-class life that looks sickly and
debilitating when you see it from a working-class angle.
In a working-class home--I am not thinking at the moment of the
unemployed, but of comparatively prosperous homes--you breathe a warm,
decent, deeply human atmosphere which it is not so easy to find
elsewhere. I should say that a manual worker, if he is in steady work
and drawing good wages--an 'if which gets bigger and bigger--has a
better chance of being happy than an 'educated' man. His home life seems
to fall more naturally into a sane and comely shape. I have often been
struck by the peculiar easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it
were, of a working-class interior at its best. Especially on winter
evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances
mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the
rocking chair at one side of the fire reading the racing finals, and
Mother sits on the other with her sewing, and the children are happy
with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on
the rag mat--it is a good place to be in, provided that you can be not
only in it but sufficiently _of_ it to be taken for granted.
This scene is still reduplicated in a majority of English homes, though
not in so many as before the war. Its happiness depends mainly upon one
question--whether Father is in work. But notice that the picture I have
called up, of a working-class family sitting round the coal fire after
kippers and strong tea, belongs only to our own moment of time and could
not belong either to the future or the past. Skip forward two hundred
years into the Utopian future, and the scene is totally different.
Hardly one of the things I have imagined will still be there. In that
age when there is no manual labour and everyone is 'educated', it is
hardly likely that Father will still be a rough man with enlarged hands
who likes to sit in shirt-sleeves and says 'Ah wur coomin' oop street'.
And there won't be a coal fire in the grate, only some kind of invisible
heater. The furniture will be made of rubber, glass, and steel. If there
are still such things as evening papers there will certainly be no
racing news in them, for gambling will be meaningless in a world where
there is no poverty and the horse will have vanished from the face of
the earth. Dogs, too, will have been suppressed on grounds of hygiene.
And there won't be so many children, either, if the birth-controllers
have their way. But move backwards into the Middle Ages and you are in a
world almost equally foreign. A windowless hut, a wood fire which smokes
in your face because there is no chimney, mouldy bread, 'Poor John',
lice, scurvy, a yearly child-birth and a yearly child-death, and the
priest terrifying you with tales of Hell.
Curiously enough it is not the triumphs of modern engineering, nor the
radio, nor the cinematograph, nor the five thousand novels which are
published yearly, nor the crowds at Ascot and the Eton and Harrow match,
but the memory of working-class interiors--especially as I sometimes saw
them in my childhood before the war, when England was still
prosperous--that reminds me that our age has not been altogether a bad
one to live in.
PART TWO
8
The road from Mandalay to Wigan is a long one and the reasons for taking
it are not immediately clear.
In the earlier chapters of this book I have given a rather fragmentary
account of various things I saw in the coal areas of Lancashire and
Yorkshire. I went there partly because I wanted to see what
mass-unemployment is like at its worst, partly in order to see the most
typical section of the English working class at close quarters. This was
necessary to me as part of my approach to Socialism, for before you can
be sure whether you are genuinely in favour of Socialism, you have got
to decide whether things at present are tolerable or not tolerable, and
you have got to take up a definite attitude on the terribly difficult
issue of class. Here I shall have to digress and explain how my own
attitude towards the class question was developed. Obviously this
involves writing a certain amount of autobiography, and I would not do
it if I did not think that I am sufficiently typical of my class, or
rather sub-caste, to have a certain symptomatic importance.
I was born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class.
The upper-middle class, which had its heyday in the eighties and
nineties, with Kipling as its poet laureate, was a sort of mound of
wreckage left behind when the tide of Victorian prosperity receded. Or
perhaps it would be better to change the metaphor and describe it not as
a mound but as a layer--the layer of society lying between £2000 and
£300 a year: my own family was not far from the bottom. You notice that
I define it in terms of money, because that is always the quickest way
of making yourself understood. Nevertheless, the essential point about
the English class-system is that it is not entirely explicable in terms
of money. Roughly speaking it is a money-stratification, but it is also
interpenetrated by a sort of shadowy caste-system; rather like a
jerry-built modern bungalow haunted by medieval ghosts. Hence the fact
that the upper-middle class extends or extended to incomes as low as
£300 a year--to incomes, that is, much lower than those of merely
middle-class people with no social pretensions. Probably there are
countries where you can predict a man's opinions from his income, but it
is never quite safe to do so in England; you have always got to take his
traditions into consideration as well. A naval officer and his grocer
very likely have the same income, but they are not equivalent persons
and they would only be on the same side in very large issues such as a
war or a general strike--possibly not even then.
Of course it is obvious now that the upper-middle class is done for. In
every country town in Southern England, not to mention the dreary wastes
of Kensington and Earl's Court, those who knew it in the days of its
glory are dying, vaguely embittered by a world which has not behaved as
it ought. I never open one of Kipling's books or go into one of the huge
dull shops which were once the favourite haunt of the upper-middle
class, without thinking 'Change and decay in all around I see'. But
before the war the upper-middle class, though already none too
prosperous, still felt sure of itself. Before the war you were either a
gentleman or not a gentleman, and if you were a gentleman you struggled
to behave as such, whatever your income might be. Between those with
£400 a year and those with £2000 or even £1000 a year there was a great
gulf fixed, but it was a gulf which those with £400 a year did their
best to ignore. Probably the distinguishing mark of the upper-middle
class was that its traditions were not to any extent commercial, but
mainly military, official, and professional.
People in this class owned no land, but they felt that they were
landowners in the sight of God and kept up a semi-aristocratic outlook
by going into the professions and the fighting services rather than into
trade. Small boys used to count the plum stones on their plates and
foretell their destiny by chanting, 'Army, Navy, Church, Medicine, Law';
and even of these 'Medicine' was faintly inferior to the others and only
put in for the sake of symmetry. To belong to this class when you were
at the £400 a year level was a queer business, for it meant that your
gentility was almost purely theoretical. You lived, so to speak, at two
levels simultaneously. Theoretically you knew all about servants and how
to tip them, although in practice you had one, at most, two resident
servants. Theoretically you knew how to wear your clothes and how to
order a dinner, although in practice you could never afford to go to a
decent tailor or a decent restaurant. Theoretically you knew how to
shoot and ride, although in practice you had no horses to ride and not
an inch of ground to shoot over. It was this that explained the
attraction of India (more recently Kenya, Nigeria, etc.) for the
lower-upper-middle class. The people who went there as soldiers and
officials did not go there to make money, for a soldier or an official
does not want money; they went there because in India, with cheap
horses, free shooting, and hordes of black servants, it was so easy to
play at being a gentleman.
In the kind of shabby-genteel family that I am talking about there is
far more _consciousness_ of poverty than in any working-class family
above the level of the dole. Rent and clothes and school-bills are an
unending nightmare, and every luxury, even a glass of beer, is an
unwarrantable extravagance. Practically the whole family income goes in
keeping up appearances. It is obvious that people of this kind are in an
anomalous position, and one might 'be tempted to write them off as mere
exceptions and therefore unimportant. Actually, however, they are or
were fairly numerous. Most clergymen and schoolmasters, for instance,
nearly all Anglo-Indian officials, a sprinkling of soldiers and sailors,
and a fair number of professional men and artists, fall into this
category. But the real importance of this class is that they are the
shock-absorbers of the bourgeoisie. The real bourgeoisie, those in the
£2000 a year class and over, have their money as a thick layer of
padding between themselves and the class they plunder; in so far as they
are aware of the Lower Orders at all they are aware of them as
employees, servants, and tradesmen. But it is quite different for the
poor devils lower down who are struggling to live genteel lives on what
are virtually working-class incomes. These last are forced into close
and, in a sense, intimate contact with the working class, and I suspect
it is from them that the traditional upper-class attitude towards
'common' people is derived.
And what is this attitude? An attitude of sniggering superiority
punctuated by bursts of vicious hatred. Look at any number of Punch
during the past thirty years. You will find it everywhere taken for
granted that a working-class person, as such, is a figure of fun, except
at odd moments when he shows signs of being too prosperous, whereupon he
ceases to be a figure of fun and becomes a demon. It is no use wasting
breath in denouncing this attitude. It is better to consider how it has
arisen, and to do that one has got to realize what the working classes
look like to those who live among them but have different habits and
traditions.
A shabby genteel family is in much the same position as a family of
'poor whites' living in a street where everyone else is a Negro. In such
circumstances you have got to cling to your gentility because it is the
only thing you have; and meanwhile you are hated for your stuck-up-ness
and for the accent and manners which stamp you as one of the boss class.
I was very young, not much more than six, when I first became aware of
class-distinctions. Before that age my chief heroes had generally been
working-class people, because they always seemed to do such interesting
things, such as being fishermen and blacksmiths and bricklayers. I
remember the farm hands on a farm in Cornwall who used to let me ride on
the drill when they were sowing turnips and would sometimes catch the
ewes and milk them to give me a drink; and the workmen building the new
house next door, who let me play with the wet mortar and from whom I
first learned the word 'b----'; and the plumber up the road with whose
children I used to go out bird-nesting. But it was not long before I was
forbidden to play with the plumber's children; they were 'common' and I
was told to keep away from them. This was snobbish, if you like, but it
was also necessary, for middle-class people can-not afford to let their
children grow up with vulgar accents. So, very early, the working class
ceased to be a race of friendly and wonderful beings and became a race
of enemies. We realized that they hated us, but we could never
understand why, and naturally we set it down to pure, vicious malignity.
To me in my early boyhood, to nearly all children of families like mine,
'common' people seemed almost sub-human. They had coarse faces, hideous
accents, and gross manners, they hated everyone who was not like
themselves, and if they got half a chance they would insult you in
brutal ways. That was our view of them, and though it was false it was
understandable. For one must remember that before the war there was much
more _overt_ class-hatred in England than there is now. In those days
you were quite likely to be insulted simply for looking like a member of
the upper classes; nowadays, on the other hand, you are more likely to
be fawned upon. Anyone over thirty can remember the time when it was
impossible for a well-dressed person to walk through a slum street
without being hooted at. Whole quarters of big towns were considered
unsafe because of' hooligans' (now almost an extinct type), and the
London gutter-boy everywhere, with his loud voice and lack of
intellectual scruples, could make life a misery for people who
considered it beneath their dignity to answer back. A recurrent terror
of my holidays, when I was a small boy, was the gangs of' cads' who were
liable to set upon you five or ten to one. In term time, on the other
hand, it was we who were in the majority and the 'cads' who were
oppressed; I remember a couple of savage mass-battles in the cold winter
of 1916-17. And this tradition of open hostility between upper and lower
class had apparently been the same for at least a century past. A
typical joke in _Punch_ in the sixties is a picture of a small,
nervous-looking gentleman riding through a slum street and a crowd of
street-boys closing in on him with shouts ''Ere comes a swell! Let's
frighten 'is 'oss!' Just fancy the street boys trying to frighten his
horse now! They would be much likelier to hang round him in vague hopes
of a tip. During the past dozen years the English working class have
grown servile with a rather horrifying rapidity. It was bound to happen,
for the frightful weapon of unemployment has cowed them. Before the war
their economic position was comparatively strong, for though there was
no dole to fall back upon, there was not much unemployment, and the
power of the boss class was not so obvious as it is now. A man did not
see ruin staring him in the face every time he cheeked a 'toff', and
naturally he did cheek a 'toff' whenever it seemed safe to do so. G. J.
Renier, in his book on Oscar Wilde, points out that the strange, obscene
burst of popular fury which followed the Wilde trial was essentially
social in character. The 'London mob had caught a member of the upper
classes on the hop, and they took care to keep him hopping. All this was
natural and even proper. If you treat people as the English working
class have been treated during the past two centuries, you must expect
them to resent it. On the other hand the children of shabby-genteel
families could not be blamed if they grew up with a hatred of the
working class, typified for them by prowling gangs of 'cads'.
But there was another and more serious difficulty. Here you come to the
real secret of class distinctions in the West--the real reason why a
European of bourgeois upbringing, even when he calls himself a
Communist, cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his
equal. It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are
chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my
childhood. The words were: _The lower classes smell_.
That was what we were taught--_the lower classes smell_. And here,
obviously, you are at an impassable barrier. For no feeling of like or
dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling. Race-hatred,
religious hatred, differences of education, of temperament, of
intellect, even differences of moral code, can be got over; but
_physical_ repulsion cannot. You can have an affection for a murderer or
a sodomite, but you cannot have an affection for a man whose breath
stinks--habitually stinks, I mean. However well you may wish him,
however much you may admire his mind and character, if his breath stinks
he is horrible and in your heart of hearts you will hate him. It may not
greatly matter if the average middle-class person is brought up to
believe that the working classes are ignorant, lazy, drunken, boorish,
and dishonest; it is when he is brought up to believe that they are
dirty that the harm is done. And in my childhood we were brought up to
believe that they were dirty. Very early in life you acquired the idea
that there was something subtly repulsive about a working-class body;
you would not get nearer to it than you could help. You watched a great
sweaty navvy walking down the road with his pick over his shoulder; you
looked at his discoloured shirt and his corduroy trousers stiff with the
dirt of a decade; you thought of those nests and layers of greasy rags
below, and, under all, the unwashed body, brown all over (that was how I
used to imagine it), with its strong, bacon-like reek. You watched a
tramp taking off his boots in a ditch--ugh! It did not seriously occur
to you that the tramp might not enjoy having black feet. And even
'lower-class' people whom you knew to be quite clean--servants, for
instance--were faintly unappetizing. The smell of their sweat, the very
texture of their skins, were mysteriously different from yours.
Everyone who has grown up pronouncing his aitches and in a house with a
bathroom and one servant is likely to have grown up with these feelings;
hence the chasmic, impassable quality of class-distinctions in the West.
It is queer how seldom this is admitted. At the moment I can think of
only one book where it is set forth without humbug, and that is Mr
Somerset Maugham's _On a Chinese Screen_. Mr Maugham describes a high
Chinese official arriving at a wayside inn and blustering and calling
everybody names in order to impress upon them that he is a supreme
dignitary and they are only worms. Five minutes later, having asserted
his dignity in the way he thinks proper, he is eating his dinner in
perfect amity with the baggage coolies. As an official he feels that he
has got to make his presence felt, but he has no feeling that the
coolies are of different clay from himself. I have observed countless
similar scenes in Burma. Among Mongolians--among all Asiatics, for all I
know--there is a sort of natural equality, an easy intimacy between man
and man, which is simply unthinkable in the West. Mr Maugham adds:
In the West we are divided from our fellows by our sense of smell. The
working man is our master, inclined to rule us with an iron hand, but it
cannot be denied that he stinks: none can wonder at it, for a bath in
the dawn when you have to hurry to your work before the factory bell
rings is no pleasant thing, nor 'does heavy labour tend to sweetness;
and you do not change your linen more than you can help when the week's
washing must be done by a sharp-tongued wife. I do not blame the working
man because he stinks, but stink he does. It makes social intercourse
difficult to persons of sensitive nostril. The matutinal tub divides the
classes more effectually than birth, wealth, or education.
Meanwhile, _do_ the 'lower classes' smell? Of course, as a whole, they
are dirtier than the upper classes. They are bound to be, considering
the circumstances in which they live, for even at this late date less
than half the houses in England have bathrooms. Besides, the habit of
washing yourself all over every day is a very recent one in Europe, and
the working classes are generally more conservative than the
bourgeoisie. But the English are growing visibly cleaner, and we may
hope that in a hundred years they will be almost as clean as the
Japanese. It is a pity that those who idealize the working class so
often think it necessary to praise every working-class characteristic
and therefore to pretend that dirtiness is somehow meritorious in
itself. Here, curiously enough, the Socialist and the sentimental
democratic Catholic of the type of Chesterton sometimes join hands; both
will tell you that dirtiness is healthy and 'natural' and cleanliness is
a mere fad or at best a luxury.[According to Chesterton, dirtiness is
merely a kind of 'discomfort' and therefore ranks as self-mortification.
Unfortunately, the discomfort of dirtiness is chiefly suffered by other
people. It is not really very uncomfortable to be dirty--not nearly so
uncomfortable as having a cold bath on a winter morning.] They seem not
to see that they are merely giving colour to the notion that
working-class people are dirty from choice and not from necessity.
Actually, people who have access to a bath will generally use it. But
the essential thing is that middle-class people believe that the working
class are dirty--you see from the passage quoted above that Mr Maugham
himself believes it--and, what is worse, that they are some-how
_inherently_ dirty. As a child, one of the most dreadful things I could
imagine was to drink out of a bottle after a navvy. Once when I was
thirteen, I was in a train coming from a market town, and the
third-class carriage was packed full of shepherds and pig-men who had
been selling their beasts. Somebody produced a quart bottle of beer and
passed it round; it travelled from mouth to mouth to mouth, everyone
taking a swig. I cannot describe the horror I felt as that bottle worked
its way towards me. If I drank from it after all those lower-class male
mouths I felt certain I should vomit; on the other hand, if they offered
it to me I dared not refuse for fear of offending them--you see here how
the middle-class squeamishness works both ways. Nowadays, thank God, I
have no feelings of that kind. A working man's body, as such, is no more
repulsive to me than a millionaire's. I still don't like drinking out of
a cup or bottle after another person--another man, I mean; with women I
don't mind--but at least the question of class does not enter. It was
rubbing shoulders with the tramps that cured me of it. Tramps are not
really very dirty as English people go, but they have the name for being
dirty, and when you have shared a bed with a tramp and drunk tea out of
the same snuff-tin, you feel that you have seen the worst and the worst
has no terrors for you.
I have dwelt on these subjects because they are vitally important. To
get rid of class-distinctions you have got to start by understanding how
one class appears when seen through the eyes of another. It is useless
to say that the middle classes are 'snobbish' and leave it at that. You
get no further if you do not realize that snobbishness is bound up with
a species of idealism. It derives from the early training in which a
middle-class child is taught almost simultaneously to wash his neck, to
be ready to die for his country, and to despise the 'lower classes'.
Here I shall be accused of being behind the times, for I was a child
before and during the war and it may be claimed that children nowadays
are brought up with more enlightened notions. It is probably true that
class-feeling is for the moment a very little less bitter than it was.
The working class are submissive where they used to be openly hostile,
and the post-war manufacture of cheap clothes and the general softening
of manners have toned down the surface differences between class and
class. But undoubtedly the essential feeling is still there. Every
middle-class person has a dormant class-prejudice which needs only a
small thing to arouse it; and if he is over forty he probably has a firm
conviction that his own class has been sacrificed to the class below.
Suggest to the average unthinking person of gentle birth who is
struggling to keep up appearances on four or five hundred a year that he
is a member of an exploiting parasite class, and he will think you are
mad. In perfect sincerity he will point out to you a dozen ways in which
he is worse-off than a working man. In his eyes the workers are not a
submerged race of slaves, they are a sinister flood creeping upwards to
engulf himself and his friends and his family and to sweep all culture
and all decency out of existence. Hence that queer watchful anxiety lest
the working class shall grow too prosperous. In a number of _Punch_ soon
after the war, when coal was still fetching high prices, there is a
picture of four or five miners with grim, sinister faces riding in a
cheap motor-car. A friend they are passing calls out and asks them where
they have borrowed it. They answer, 'We've bought the thing!' This, you
see, is 'good enough for _Punch_'; for miners to buy a motor-car, even
one car between four or five of them, is a monstrosity, a sort of crime
against nature. That was the attitude of a dozen years ago, and I see no
evidence of any fundamental change. The notion that the working class
have been absurdly pampered, hopelessly demoralized by doles, old age
pensions, free education, etc., is still widely held; it has merely been
a little shaken, perhaps, by the recent recognition that unemployment
does exist. For quantities of middle-class people, probably for a large
majority of those over fifty, the typical working man still rides to the
Labour Exchange on a motor-bike and keeps coal in his bath-tub: 'And, if
you'll believe it, my dear, they actually _get married_ on the dole!'
The reason why class-hatred seems to be diminishing is that nowadays it
tends not to get into print, partly owing to the mealy-mouthed habits of
our time, partly because newspapers and even books now have to appeal to
a working-class public. As a rule you can best study it in private
conversations. But if you want some printed examples, it is worth having
a look at the _obiter dicta_ of the late Professor Saintsbury.
Saintsbury was a very learned man and along certain lines a judicious
literary critic, but when he talked of political or economic matters he
only differed from the rest of his class by the fact that he was too
thick-skinned and had been born too early to see any reason for
pretending to common decency. According to Saintsbury, unemployment
insurance was simply 'contributing to the support of lazy
ne'er-do-weels', and the whole trade union movement was no more than a
kind of organized mendicancy:
'Pauper' is almost actionable now, is it not, when used as a word?
though to be paupers, in the sense of being wholly or partly supported
at the expense of other people, is the ardent, and to a considerable
extent achieved, aspiration of a large proportion of our population, and
of an entire political party.
(_Second Scrap Book_)
It is to be noticed, however, that Saintsbury recognizes that
unemployment is bound to exist, and, in fact, thinks that it ought
to-.exist, so long as the unemployed are made to suffer as much as
possible:
Is not 'casual' labour the very secret and safety-valve of a safe and
sound labour-system generally?
...In a complicated industrial and commercial state constant employment
at regular wages is impossible; while dole-supported unemployment, at
anything like the wages of employment, is demoralizing to begin with and
ruinous at its more or less quickly arriving end.
(_Last Scrap Book_)
What exactly is to happen to the 'casual labourers' when no casual
labour happens to be available is not made clear. Presumably (Saintsbury
speaks approvingly of 'good Poor Laws') they are to go into the
work-house or sleep in the streets. As to the notion that every human
being ought as a matter of course to have the chance of earning at least
a tolerable livelihood, Saintsbury dismisses it with contempt:
Even the 'right to live'...extends no further than the right to
protection against murder. Charity certainly will, morality possibly
may, and public utility perhaps ought to add to this protection
supererogatory provision for continuance of life; but it is questionable
whether strict justice demands it.
As for the insane doctrine that being born in a country gives some right
to the possession of the soil of that country, it hardly requires
notice.
(_Last Scrap Book_)
It is worth reflecting for a moment upon the beautiful implications of
this last passage. The interest of passages like these (and they are
scattered all through Saintsbury's work) lies in their having been
printed at all. Most people are a little shy of putting that kind of
thing on paper. But what Saintsbury is saying here is what any little
worm with a fairly safe five hundred a year _thinks_, and therefore in a
way one must admire him for saying it. It takes a lot of guts to be
_openly_ such a skunk as that.
This is the outlook of a confessed reactionary. But how about the
middle-class person whose views are not reactionary but 'advanced'?
Beneath his revolutionary mask, is he really so different from the
other?
A middle-class person embraces Socialism and perhaps even joins the
Communist Party. How much real difference does it make? Obviously,
living within the framework of capitalist society, he has got to go on
earning his living, and one cannot blame him if he clings to his
bourgeois economic status. But is there any change in his tastes, his
habits, his manners, his imaginative background--his 'ideology', in
Communist jargon? Is there any change in him except that he now votes
Labour, or, when possible, Communist at the elections? It is noticeable
that he still habitually associates with his own class; he is vastly
more at home with a member of his own class, who thinks him a dangerous
Bolshie, than with a member of the working class who supposedly agrees
with him; his tastes in food, wine, clothes, books, pictures, music,
ballet, are still recognizably bourgeois tastes; most significant of
all, he invariably marries into his own class. Look at any bourgeois
Socialist. Look at Comrade X, member of the C.P.G.B. and author of
_Marxism for Infants_. Comrade X, it so happens, is an old Etonian. He
would be ready to die on the barricades, in theory anyway, but you
notice that he still leaves his bottom waistcoat button undone. He
idealizes the proletariat, but it is remarkable how little his habits
resemble theirs. Perhaps once, out of sheer bravado, he has smoked a
cigar with the band on, but it would be almost physically impossible for
him to put pieces of cheese into his mouth on the point of his knife, or
to sit indoors with his cap on, or even to drink his tea out of the
saucer. I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists, I have listened by
the hour to their tirades against their own class, and yet never, not
even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners.
Yet, after all, why not? Why should a man who thinks all virtue resides
in the proletariat still take such pains to drink his soup silently? It
can only be because in his heart he feels that proletarian manners are
disgusting. So you see he is still responding to the training of his
childhood, when he was taught to hate, fear, and despise the working
class.
9
When I was fourteen or fifteen I was an odious little snob, but no worse
than other boys of my own age and class. I suppose there is no place in
the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is
cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public
school. Here at least one cannot say that English 'education' fails to
do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of
leaving school--I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at
thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet--but your
snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it
is, sticks by you till your grave.
At school I was in a difficult position, for I was among boys who, for
the most part, were much richer than myself, and I only went to an
expensive public school because I happened to win a scholarship. This is
the common experience of boys of the lower-upper-middle class, the sons
of clergymen, Anglo-Indian officials, etc., and the effects it had on me
were probably the usual ones. On the one hand it made me cling tighter
than ever to my gentility; on the other hand it filled me with
resentment against the boys whose parents were richer than mine and who
took care to let me know it. I despised anyone who was not describable
as a 'gentleman', but also I hated the hoggishly rich, especially those
who had grown rich too recently. The correct and elegant thing, I felt,
was to be of gentle birth but to have no money. This is part of the
_credo_ of the lower-upper-middle class. It has a romantic,
Jacobite-in-exile feeling about it which is very comforting.
But those years, during and just after the war, were a queer time to be
at school, for England was nearer revolution than she has been since or
had been for a century earlier. Throughout almost the whole nation there
was running a wave of revolutionary feeling which has since been
reversed and forgotten, but which has left various deposits of sediment
behind. Essentially, though of course one could not then see it in
perspective, it was a revolt of youth against age, resulting directly
from the war. In the war the young had been sacrificed and the old had
behaved in a way which, even at this distance of time, is horrible to
contemplate; they had been sternly patriotic in safe places while their
sons went down like swathes of hay before the German machine guns.
Moreover, the war had been conducted mainly by old men and had been
conducted with supreme incompetence. By 1918 everyone under forty was in
a bad temper with his elders, and the mood of anti-militarism which
followed naturally upon the fighting was extended into a general revolt
against orthodoxy and authority. At that time there was, among the
young, a curious cult of hatred of 'old men'. The dominance of 'old men'
was held to be responsible for every evil known to humanity, and every
accepted institution from Scott's novels to the House of Lords was
derided merely because 'old men' were in favour of it. For several years
it was all the fashion to be a 'Bolshie', as people then called it.
England was full of half-baked antinomian opinions. Pacifism,
internationalism, humanitarianism of all kinds, feminism, free love,
divorce-reform, atheism, birth-control--things like these were getting a
better hearing than they would get in normal times. And of course the
revolutionary mood extended to those who had been too young to fight,
even to public schoolboys. At that time we all thought of ourselves as
enlightened creatures of a new age, casting off the orthodoxy that had
been forced upon us by those detested 'old men'. We retained, basically,
the snobbish outlook of our class, we took it for granted that we could
continue to draw our dividends or tumble into soft jobs, but also it
seemed natural to us to be 'agin the Government'.
We derided the O.T.C., the Christian religion, and perhaps even
compulsory games and the Royal Family, and we did not realize that we
were merely taking part in a world-wide gesture of distaste for war. Two
incidents stick in my mind as examples of the queer revolutionary
feeling of that time. One day the master who taught us English set us a
kind of general knowledge paper of which one of the questions was, 'Whom
do you consider the ten greatest men now living?' Of sixteen boys in the
class (our average age was about seventeen) fifteen included Lenin in
their list. This was at a snobbish expensive public school, and the date
was 1920, when the horrors of the Russian Revolution was still fresh in
everyone's mind. Also there were the so-called peace celebrations in
1919. Our elders had decided for us that we should celebrate peace in
the traditional manner by whooping over the fallen foe. We were to march
into the school-yard, carrying torches, and sing jingo songs of the type
of 'Rule Britannia'. The boys--to their honour, I think--guyed the whole
proceeding and sang blasphemous and seditious words to the tunes
provided. I doubt whether things would happen in quite that manner now.
Certainly the public schoolboys I meet nowadays, even the intelligent
ones, are much more right-wing in their opinions than I and my
contemporaries were fifteen years ago.
Hence, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, I was both a snob and a
revolutionary. I was against all authority. I had read and re-read the
entire published works of Shaw, Wells, and Galsworthy (at that time
still regarded as dangerously 'advanced' writers), and I loosely
described myself as a Socialist. But I had not much grasp of what
Socialism meant, and no notion that the working class were human beings.
At a distance, and through the medium of books--Jack London's _The
People of the Abyss_, for instance--I could agonize over their
sufferings, but I still hated them and despised them when I came
anywhere near them. I was still revolted by their accents and infuriated
by their habitual rudeness. One must remember that just then,
immediately after the war, the English working class were in a fighting
mood. That was the period of the great coal strikes, when a miner was
thought of as a fiend incarnate and old ladies looked under their beds
every night lest Robert Smillie should be concealed there. All through
the war and for a little time afterwards there had been high wages and
abundant employment; things were now returning to something worse than
normal, and naturally the working class resisted. The men who had fought
had been lured into the army by gaudy promises, and now they were coming
home to a world where there were no jobs and not even any houses.
Moreover, they had been at war and were coming home with the soldier's
attitude to life, which is fundamentally, in spite of discipline, a
lawless attitude. There was a turbulent feeling in the air. To that time
belongs the song with the memorable refrain:
There's nothing sure but
The rich get richer and the poor get children;
In the mean time,
In between time,
Ain't we got fun?
People had not yet settled down to a lifetime of unemployment mitigated
by endless cups of tea. They still vaguely expected the Utopia for which
they had fought, and even more than before they were openly hostile to
the aitch-pronouncing class. So to the shock-absorbers of the
bourgeoisie, such as myself, 'common people' still appeared brutal and
repulsive. Looking back upon that period, I seem to have spent half the
time in denouncing the capitalist system and the other half in raging
over the insolence of bus-conductors.
When I was not yet twenty I went to Burma, in the Indian Imperial
Police. In an 'outpost of Empire' like Burma the class-question appeared
at first sight to have been shelved. There was no obvious class-friction
here, because the all-important thing was not whether you had been to
one of the right schools but whether your skin was technically white. As
a matter of fact most of the white men in Burma were not of the type who
in England would be called 'gentlemen', but except for the common
soldiers and a few nondescripts they lived lives appropriate to
'gentlemen'--had servants, that is, and called their evening meal
'dinner'--and officially they were regarded as being all of the same
class. They were 'white men', in contradistinction to the other and
inferior class, the 'natives'. But one did not feel towards the
'natives' as one felt to-wards the 'lower classes' at home. The
essential point was that the 'natives', at any rate the Burmese, were
not felt to be physically repulsive. One looked down on them as
'natives', but one was quite ready to be physically intimate with them;
and this, I noticed, was the case even with white men who had the most
vicious colour prejudice. When you have a lot of servants you soon get
into lazy habits, and I habitually allowed myself, for instance, to be
dressed and undressed by my Burmese boy. This was because he was a
Burman and undisgusting; I could not have endured to let an English
manservant handle me in that intimate manner. I felt towards a Burman
almost as I felt towards a woman. Like most other races, the Burmese
have a distinctive smell--I cannot describe it: it is a smell that makes
one's teeth tingle--but this smell never disgusted me. (Incidentally,
Orientals say that we smell. The Chinese, I believe, say that a white
man smells like a corpse. The Burmese say the same--though no Burman was
ever rude enough to say so to me.) And in a way my attitude was
defensible, for if one faces the fact one must admit that most
Mongolians have much nicer bodies than most white men. Compare the
firm-knit silken skin of the Burman, which does not wrinkle at all till
he is past forty, and then merely withers up like a piece of dry
leather, with the coarse-grained, flabby, sagging skin of the white man.
The white man has lank ugly hair growing down his legs and the backs of
his arms and in an ugly patch on his chest. The Burman has only a tuft
or two of stiff black hair at the appropriate places; for the rest he is
quite hairless and is usually beardless as well. The white man almost
always goes bald, the Burman seldom or never. The Burman's teeth are
perfect, though generally discoloured by betel juice, the white man's
teeth invariably decay. The white man is generally ill-shaped, and when
he grows fat he bulges in improbable places; the Mongol has beautiful
bones and in old age he is almost as shapely as in youth. Admittedly the
white races throw up a few individuals who for a few years are supremely
beautiful; but on the whole, say what you will, they are far less comely
than Orientals. But it was not of this that I was thinking when I found
the English 'lower classes' so much more repellent than Burmese
'natives'. I was still thinking in terms of my early-acquired
class-prejudice. When I was not much past twenty I was attached for a
short time to a British regiment. Of course I admired and liked the
private soldiers as any youth of twenty would admire and like hefty,
cheery youths five years older than himself with the medals of the Great
War on their chests. And yet, after all, they faintly repelled me; they
were 'common people' and I did not care to be too close to them. In the
hot mornings when the company marched down the road, myself in the rear
with one of the junior subalterns, the steam of those hundred sweating
bodies in front made my stomach turn. And this, you observe, was pure
prejudice. For a soldier is probably as inoffensive, physically, as it
is possible for a male white person to be. He is generally young, he is
nearly always healthy from fresh air and exercise, and a rigorous
discipline compels him to be clean. But I could not see it like that.
All I knew was that it was _lower-class_ sweat that I was smelling, and
the thought of it made me sick.
When later on I got rid of my class-prejudice, or part of it, it was in
a roundabout way and by a process that took several years. The thing
that changed my attitude to the class-issue was something only
indirectly connected with it--something almost irrelevant.
I was in the Indian Police five years, and by the end of that time I
hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness which I probably
cannot make clear. In the free air of England that kind of thing is not
fully intelligible. In order to hate imperialism you have got to be part
of it. Seen from the outside the British rule in India appears--indeed,
it _is_--benevolent and even necessary; and so no doubt are the French
rule in Morocco and the Dutch rule in Borneo, for people usually govern
foreigners better than they govern themselves. But it is not possible to
be a part of such a system without recognizing it as an unjustifiable
tyranny. Even the thickest-skinned Anglo-Indian is aware of this. Every
'native' face he sees in the street brings home to him his monstrous
intrusion. And the majority of Anglo-Indians, intermittently at least,
are not nearly so complacent about their position as people in England
believe. From the most unexpected people, from gin-pickled old
scoundrels high up in the Government service, I have heard some such
remark as: 'Of course we've no right in this blasted country at all.
Only now we're here for God's sake let's stay here.' The truth is that
no modern man, in his heart of hearts, believes that it is right to
invade a foreign country and hold the population down by force. Foreign
oppression is a much more obvious, understandable evil than economic
oppression. Thus in England we tamely admit to being robbed in order to
keep half a million worthless idlers in luxury, but we would fight to
the last man sooner than be ruled by Chinamen; similarly, people who
live on unearned dividends without a single qualm of conscience, see
clearly enough that it is wrong to go and lord it in a foreign country
where you are not wanted. The result is that every Anglo-Indian is
haunted by a sense of guilt which he usually conceals as best he can,
because there is no freedom of speech, and merely to be overheard making
a seditious remark may damage his career. All over India there are
Englishmen who secretly loathe the system of which they are part; and
just occasionally, when they are quite certain of being in the right
company, their hidden bitterness overflows. I remember a night I spent
on the train with a man in the Educational Service, a stranger to myself
whose name I never discovered. It was too hot to sleep and we spent the
night in talking. Half an hour's cautious questioning decided each of us
that the other was 'safe'; and then for hours, while the train jolted
slowly through the pitch-black night, sitting up in our bunks with
bottles of beer handy, we damned the British Empire--damned it from the
inside, intelligently and intimately. It did us both good. But we had
been speaking forbidden things, and in the haggard morning light when
the train crawled into Mandalay, we parted as guiltily as any adulterous
couple.
So far as my observation goes nearly all Anglo-Indian officials have
moments when their conscience troubles them. The exceptions are men who
are doing something which is demonstrably useful and would still have to
be done whether the British were in India or not: forest officers, for
instance, and doctors and engineers. But I was in the police, which is
to say that I was part of the actual machinery of despotism. Moreover,
in the police you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters, and
there is an appreciable difference between doing dirty work and merely
profiting by it. Most people approve of capital punishment, but most
people wouldn't do the hangman's job. Even the other Europeans in Burma
slightly looked down on the police because of the brutal work they had
to do. I remember once when I was inspecting a police station, an
American missionary whom I knew fairly well came in for some purpose or
other. Like most Nonconformist missionaries he was a complete ass but
quite a good fellow. One of my native sub-inspectors was bullying a
suspect (I described this scene in _Burmese Days_). The American watched
it, and then turning to me said thoughtfully, 'I wouldn't care to have
your job.' It made me horribly ashamed. So _that_ was the kind of job I
had! Even an ass of an American missionary, a teetotal cock-virgin from
the Middle West, had the right to look down on me and pity me! But I
should have felt the same shame even if there had been no one to bring
it home to me. I had begun to have an indescribable loathing of the
whole machinery of so-called justice. Say what you will, pur criminal
law (far more humane, by the way, in India than in England) is a
horrible thing. It needs very insensitive people to administer it. The
wretched prisoners squatting in the reeking cages of the lock-ups, the
grey cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the
men who had been flogged with bamboos, the women and children howling
when their menfolk were led away under arrest--things like these are
beyond bearing when you are in any way directly responsible for them. I
watched a man hanged once; it seemed to me worse than a thousand
murders. I never went into a jail without feeling (most visitors to
jails feel the same) that my place was on the other side of the bars. I
thought then--I think now, for that matter--that the worst criminal who
ever walked is morally superior to a hanging judge. But of course I had
to keep these notions to myself, because of the almost utter silence
that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. In the end I worked out
an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment
always does more harm than the crime and that people can be trusted to
behave decently if only you will let them alone. This of course was
sentimental nonsense. I see now as I did not see then, that it is always
necessary to protect peaceful people from violence. In any state of
society where crime can be profitable you have got to have a harsh
criminal law and administer it ruthlessly; the alternative is Al Capone.
But the feeling that punishment is evil arises inescapably in those who
have to administer it. I should expect to find that even in England many
policemen, judges, prison warders, and the like are haunted by a secret
horror of what they do. But in Burma it was a double oppression that we
were committing. Not only were we hanging people and putting them in
jail and so forth; we were doing it in the capacity of unwanted foreign
invaders. The Burmese themselves never really recognized our
jurisdiction. The thief whom we put in prison did not think of himself
as a criminal justly punished, he thought of himself as the victim of a
foreign conqueror. The thing that was done to him was merely a wanton
meaningless cruelty. His face, behind the stout teak bars of the lock-up
and the iron bars of the jail, said so clearly. And unfortunately I had
not trained myself to be indifferent to the expression of the human
face.
When I came home on leave in 1927 I was already half determined to throw
up my job, and one sniff of English air decided me. I was not going back
to be a part of that evil despotism. But I wanted much more than merely
to escape from my job. For five years I had been part of an oppressive
system, and it had left me with a bad conscience. Innumerable remembered
faces--faces of prisoners in the dock, of men waiting in the condemned
cells, of subordinates I had bullied and aged peasants I had snubbed, of
servants and coolies I had hit with my fist in moments of rage (nearly
everyone does these things in the East, at any rate occasionally:
Orientals can be very provoking)--haunted me intolerably. I was
conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate. I
suppose that sounds exaggerated; but if you do for five years a job that
you thoroughly disapprove of, you will probably feel the same. I had
reduced everything to the simple theory that the oppressed are always
right and the oppressors are always wrong: a mistaken theory, but the
natural result of being one of the oppressors yourself. I felt that I
had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of
man's dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down
among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their
tyrants. And, chiefly because I had had to think everything out in
solitude, I had carried my hatred of oppression to extraordinary
lengths. At that time failure seemed to me to be the only virtue. Every
suspicion of self-advancement, even to 'succeed' in life to the extent
of making a few hundreds a year, seemed to me spiritually ugly, a
species of bullying.
It was in this way that my thoughts turned towards the English working
class. It was the first time that I had ever been really aware of the
working class, and to begin with it was only because they supplied an
analogy. They were the symbolic victims of injustice, playing the same
part in England as the Burmese played in Burma. In Burma the issue had
been quite simple. The whites were up and the blacks were down, and
therefore as a matter of course one's sympathy was with the blacks. I
now realized that there was no need to go as far as Burma to find
tyranny and exploitation. Here in England, down under one's feet, were
the submerged working class, suffering miseries which in their different
way were as bad as any an Oriental ever knows. The word 'unemployment'
was on everyone's lips. That was more or less new to me, after Burma,
but the drivel which the middle classes were still talking ('These
unemployed are all unemployables', etc., etc.) failed to deceive me. I
often wonder whether that kind of stuff deceives even the fools who
utter it. On the other hand I had at that time no interest in Socialism
or any other economic theory. It seemed to me then--it sometimes seems
to me now, for that matter--that economic injustice will stop the moment
we want it to stop, and no sooner, and if we genuinely want it to stop
the method adopted hardly matters.
But I knew nothing about working-class conditions. I had read the
unemployment figures but I had no notion of what they implied; above
all, I did not know the essential fact that 'respectable' poverty is
always the worst. The frightful doom of a decent working man suddenly
thrown on the streets after a lifetime of steady work, his agonized
struggles against economic laws which he does not under-stand, the
disintegration of families, the corroding sense of shame--all this was
outside the range of my experience. When I thought of poverty I thought
of it in terms of brute starvation. Therefore my mind turned immediately
towards the extreme cases, the social outcasts: tramps, beggars,
criminals, prostitutes. These were 'the lowest of the low', and these
were the people with whom I wanted to get in contact. What I profoundly
wanted, at that time, was to find some way of getting out of the
respectable world altogether. I meditated upon it a great deal, I even
planned parts of it in detail; how one could sell everything, give
everything away, change one's name and start out with no money and
nothing but the clothes one stood up in. But in real life nobody ever
does that kind of thing; apart from the relatives and friends who have
to be considered, it is doubtful whether an educated man _could_ do it
if there were any other course open to him. But at least I could go
among these people, see what their lives were like and feel myself
temporarily part of their world. Once I had been among them and accepted
by them, I should have touched bottom, and--this is what I felt: I was
aware even then that it was irrational--part of my guilt would drop from
me.
I thought it over and decided what I would do. I would go suitably
disguised to Limehouse and Whitechapel and such places and sleep in
common lodging-houses and pal up with dock labourers, street hawkers,
derelict people, beggars, and, if possible, criminals. And I would find
out about tramps and how you got in touch with them and what was the
proper procedure for entering the casual ward; and then, when I felt
that I knew the ropes well enough, I would go on the road myself.
At the start it was not easy. It meant masquerading and I have no talent
for acting. I cannot, for instance, disguise my accent, at any rate not
for more than a very few minutes. I imagined--notice the frightful
class-consciousness of the Englishman--that I should be spotted as a
'gentleman' the moment I opened my mouth; so I had a hard luck story
ready in case I should be questioned, I got hold of the right kind of
clothes and dirtied them in appropriate places. I am a difficult person
to disguise, being abnormally tall, but I did at least know what a tramp
looks like. (How few people do know this, by the way! Look at any
picture of a tramp in _Punch_. They are always twenty years out of
date.) One evening, having made ready at a friend's house, I set out and
wandered eastward till I landed up at a common lodging-house in
Limehouse Causeway. It was a dark, dirty-looking place. I knew it was a
common lodging-house by the sign 'Good Beds for Single Men' in the
window. Heavens, how I had to screw up my courage before I went in! It
seems ridiculous now. But you see I was still half afraid of the working
class. I wanted to get in touch with them, I even wanted to become one
of them, but I still thought of them as alien and dangerous; going into
the dark doorway of that common lodging-house seemed to me like going
down into some dreadful subterranean place--a sewer full of rats, for
instance. I went in fully expecting a fight. The people would spot that
I was not one of themselves and immediately infer that I had come to spy
on them; and then they would set upon me and throw me out--that was what
I expected. I felt that I had got to do it, but I did not enjoy the
prospect.
Inside the door a man in shirt-sleeves appeared from somewhere or other.
This was the 'deputy', and I told him that I wanted a bed for the night.
My accent did not make him stare, I noticed; he merely demanded
ninepence and then showed me the way to a frowsy firelit kitchen
underground. There were stevedores and navvies and a few sailors sitting
about and playing draughts and drinking tea. They barely glanced at me
as I entered. But this was Saturday night and a hefty young stevedore
was drunk and was reeling about the room. He turned, saw me, and lurched
towards me with broad red face thrust out and a dangerous-looking fishy
gleam in his eyes. I stiffened myself. So the fight was coming already!
The next moment the stevedore collapsed on my chest and flung his arms
round my neck. ''Ave a cup of tea, chum!' he cried tear-fully; ''ave a
cup of tea!'
I had a cup of tea. It was a kind of baptism. After that my fears
vanished. Nobody questioned me, nobody showed offensive curiosity;
everybody was polite and gentle and took me utterly for granted. I
stayed two or three days in that common lodging-house, and a few weeks
later, having picked up a certain amount of information about the habits
of destitute people, I went on the road for the first time.
I have described all this in _Down and Out in Paris and London_ (nearly
all the incidents described there actually happened, though they have
been rearranged) and I do not want to repeat it. Later I went on the
road for much longer periods, sometimes from choice, sometimes from
necessity. I have lived in common lodging-houses for months together.
But it is that first expedition that sticks most vividly in my mind,
because of the strangeness of it--the strangeness of being at last down
there among 'the lowest of the low', and on terms of utter equality with
working-class people. A tramp, it is true, is not a typical
working-class person; still, when you are among tramps you are at any
rate merged in one section--one sub-caste--of the working class, a thing
which so far as I know can happen to you in no other way. For several
days I wandered through the northern outskirts of London with an Irish
tramp. I was his mate, temporarily. We shared the same cell at night,
and he told me the history of his life and I told him a fictitious
history of mine, and we took it in turns to beg at likely-looking houses
and divided up the proceeds. I was very happy. Here I was; among 'the
lowest of the low', at the bedrock of the Western world! The class-bar
was down, or seemed to be down. And down there in the squalid and, as a
matter of fact, horribly boring sub-world of the tramp I had a feeling
of release, of adventure, which seems absurd when I look back, but which
was sufficiently vivid at the time.
10
But unfortunately you do not solve the class problem by making friends
with tramps. At most you get rid of some of your own class-prejudice by
doing so.
Tramps, beggars, criminals, and social outcasts generally are very
exceptional beings and no more typical of the working class as a whole
than, say, the literary intelligentsia are typical of the bourgeoisie.
It is quite easy to be on terms of intimacy with a foreign
'intellectual', but it is not at all easy to be on terms of intimacy
with an ordinary respectable foreigner of the middle class. How many
Englishmen have seen the inside of an ordinary French bourgeois family,
for instance? Probably it would be quite impossible to do so, short of
marrying into it. And it is rather similar with the English working
class. Nothing is easier than to be bosom pals with a pickpocket, if you
know where to look for him; but it is very difficult to be bosom pals
with a bricklayer.
But why is it so easy to be on equal terms with social outcasts? People
have often said to me, 'Surely when you are with the tramps they don't
really accept you as one of themselves? Surely they notice that you are
different--notice the difference of accent?' etc., etc. As a matter of
fact, a fair proportion of tramps, well over a quarter I should say,
notice nothing of the kind. To begin with, many people have no ear for
accent and judge you entirely by your clothes. I was often struck by
this fact when I was begging at back doors. Some people were obviously
surprised by my 'educated' accent, others completely failed to notice
it; I was dirty and ragged and that was all they saw. Again, tramps come
from all parts of the British Isles and the variation in English accents
is enormous. A tramp is used to hearing all kinds of accents among his
mates, some of them so strange to him that he can hardly understand
them, and a man from, say, Cardiff or Durham or Dublin does not
necessarily know which of the south English accents is an 'educated'
one. In any case men with 'educated' accents, though rare among tramps,
are not unknown. But even when tramps are aware that you are of
different origin from themselves, it does not necessarily alter their
attitude. From their point of view all that matters is that you, like
themselves, are 'on the bum'. And in that world it is not done to ask
too many questions. You can tell people the history of your life if you
choose, and most tramps do so on the smallest provocation, but you are
under no compulsion to tell it and whatever story you tell will be
accepted without question. Even a bishop could be at home among tramps
if he wore the right clothes; and even if they knew he was a bishop it
might not make any difference, provided that they also knew or believed
that he was genuinely destitute. Once you are in that world and
seemingly _of_ it, it hardly matters what you have been in the past. It
is a sort of world-within-a-world where everyone is equal, a small
squalid democracy--perhaps the nearest thing to a democracy that exists
in England.
But when you come to the normal working class the position is totally
different. To begin with, there is no short cut into their midst. You
can become a tramp simply by putting on the right clothes and going to
the nearest casual ward, but you can't become a navvy or a coal-miner.
You couldn't get a job as a navvy or a coal-miner even if you were equal
to the work. Via Socialist politics you can get in touch with the
working-class intelligentsia, but they are hardly more typical than
tramps or burglars. For the rest you can only mingle with the working
class by staying in their houses as a lodger, which always has a
dangerous resemblance to 'slumming'. For some months I lived entirely in
coal-miners' houses. I ate my meals with the family, I washed at the
kitchen sink, I shared bedrooms with miners, drank beer with them,
played darts with them, talked to them by the hour together. But though
I was among them, and I hope and trust they did not find me a nuisance,
I was not one of them, and they knew it even better than I did. However
much you like them, however interesting you find their conversation,
there is always that accursed itch of class-difference, like the pea
under the princess's mattress. It is not a question of dislike or
distaste, only of _difference_, but it is enough to make real intimacy
impossible. Even with miners who described themselves as Communists I
found that it needed tactful manoeuvrings to prevent them from calling
me 'sir'; and all of them, except in moments of great animation,
softened their northern accents for my benefit. I liked them and hoped
they liked me; but I went among them as a foreigner, and both of us were
aware of it. Whichever way you turn this curse of class-difference
confronts you like a wall of stone. Or rather it is not so much like a
stone wall as the plate-glass pane of an aquarium; it is so easy to
pretend that it isn't there, and so impossible to get through it.
Unfortunately it is nowadays the fashion to pretend that the glass is
penetrable. Of course everyone knows that class-prejudice exists, but at
the same time everyone claims that _he_, in some mysterious way, is
exempt from it. Snobbishness is one of those vices which we can discern
in everyone else but' never in ourselves. Not only the _croyant et
pratiquant_ Socialist, but every 'intellectual' takes it as a matter of
course that _he_ at least is outside the class-racket; he, unlike his
neighbours, can see through the absurdity of wealth, ranks, titles,
etc., etc. 'I'm not a snob' is nowadays a kind of universal _credo_. Who
is there who has not jeered at the House of Lords, the military caste,
the Royal Family, the public schools, the huntin' and shootin' people,
the old ladies in Cheltenham boarding-houses, the horrors of 'county'
society, and the social hierarchy generally? To do so has become an
automatic gesture. You notice this particularly in novels. Every
novelist of serious pretensions adopts an ironic attitude towards his
upper-class characters. Indeed when a novelist has to put a definitely
upper-class person--a duke or a baronet or whatnot--into one of his
stories he guys him more or less instinctively. There is an important
subsidiary cause of this in the poverty of the modern upper-class
dialect. The speech of 'educated' people is now so lifeless and
characterless that a novelist can do nothing with it. By far the easiest
way of making it amusing is to burlesque it, which means pretending that
every upper-class person is an ineffectual ass. The trick is imitated
from novelist to novelist, and in the end becomes almost a reflex
action.
And yet all the while, at the bottom of his heart, every-one knows that
this is humbug. We all rail against class-distinctions, but very few
people seriously want to abolish them. Here you come upon the important
fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a
secret conviction that nothing can be changed.
If you want a good illustration of this, it is worth studying the novels
and plays of John Galsworthy, keeping one eye on their chronology.
Galsworthy is a very fine specimen of the thin-skinned, tear-in-the-eye,
pre-war humanitarian. He starts out with a morbid pity-complex which
extends even to thinking that every married woman is an angel chained to
a satyr. He is in a perpetual quiver of indignation over the sufferings
of overworked clerks, of under-paid farm hands, of fallen women, of
criminals, of prostitutes, of animals. The world, as he sees it in his
earlier books (_The Man of Property_, _Justice_, etc.), is divided into
oppressors and oppressed, with the oppressors sitting on top like some
monstrous stone idol which all the dynamite in the world cannot
overthrow. But is it so certain that he really wants it overthrown? On
the contrary, in his fight against an immovable tyranny he is upheld by
the consciousness that it is immovable. When things happen unexpectedly
and the world-order which he has known begins to crumble, he feels
somewhat differently about it. So, having set out to be the champion of
the underdog against tyranny and injustice, he ends by advocating (_vide
The Silver Spoon_) that the English working class, to cure their
economic ills, shall be deported to the colonies like batches of cattle.
If he had lived ten years longer he would quite probably have arrived at
some genteel version of Fascism. This is the inevitable fate of the
sentimentalist. All his opinions change into their opposites at the
first brush of reality.
The same streak of soggy half-baked insincerity runs through all
'advanced' opinion. Take the question of imperialism, for instance.
Every left-wing 'intellectual' is, as a matter of course, an
anti-imperialist. He claims to be outside the empire-racket as
automatically and self-righteously as he claims to be outside the
class-racket. Even the right-wing 'intellectual', who is not definitely
in revolt against British imperialism, pretends to regard it with a sort
of amused detachment. It is so easy to be witty about the British
Empire. The White Man's Burden and 'Rule, Britannia' and Kipling's
novels and Anglo-Indian bores--who could even mention such things
without a snigger? And is there any cultured person who has not at least
once in his life made a joke about that old Indian havildar who said
that if the British left India there would not be a rupee or a virgin
left between Peshawar and Delhi (or wherever it was)? That is the
attitude of the typical left-winger towards imperialism, and a
thoroughly flabby, boneless attitude it is. For in the last resort, the
only important question is. Do you want the British Empire to hold
together or do you want it to disintegrate? And at the bottom of his
heart no Englishman, least of all the kind of person who is witty about
Anglo-Indian colonels, does want it to disintegrate. For, apart from any
other consideration, the high standard of life we enjoy in England
depends upon our keeping a tight hold on the Empire, particularly the
tropical portions of it such as India and Africa. Under the capitalist
system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred
million Indians must live on the verge of starvation--an evil state of
affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat
a plate of strawberries and cream. The alternative is to throw the
Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little
island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on
herrings and potatoes. That is the very last thing that any left-winger
wants. Yet the left-winger continues to feel that he has no moral
responsibility for imperialism. He is perfectly ready to accept the
products of Empire and to save his soul by sneering at the people who
hold the Empire together.
It is at this point that one begins to grasp the unreality of most
people's attitude towards the class question. So long as it is merely a
question of ameliorating the worker's lot, every decent person is
agreed. Take a coal-miner, for example. Everyone, barring fools and
scoundrels, would like to see the miner better off. If, for instance,
the miner could ride to the coal face in a comfortable trolley instead
of crawling on his hands and knees, if he could work a three-hour shift
instead of seven and a half hours, if he could live in a decent house
with five bedrooms and a bath-room and have ten pounds a week
wages--splendid! Moreover, anyone who uses his brain knows perfectly
well that this is within the range of possibility. The world,
potentially at least, is immensely rich; develop it as it might be
developed, and we could all live like princes, supposing that we wanted
to. And to a very superficial glance the social side of the question
looks equally simple. In a sense it is true that almost everyone would
like to see class-distinctions abolished. Obviously this perpetual
uneasiness between man and man, from which we suffer in modern England,
is a curse and a nuisance. Hence the temptation few scoutmasterish
bellows of good-will. Stop calling me 'sir', you chaps! Surely we're all
men? Let's pal up and get our shoulders to the wheel and remember that
we're all equal, and what the devil does it matter if I know what kind
of ties to wear and you don't, and I drink my soup comparatively quietly
and you drink yours with the noise of water going down a waste-pipe--and
so on and so on and so on; all of it the most pernicious rubbish, but
quite alluring when it is suitably expressed.
But unfortunately you get no further by merely wishing
class-distinctions away. More exactly, it is necessary to wish them
away, but your wish has no efficacy unless you grasp what it involves.
The fact that has got to be faced is that to abolish class-distinctions
means abolishing a part of yourself. Here am I, a typical member of the
middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of
class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of
class-distinctions. All my notions--notions of good and evil, of
pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and
beautiful--are essentially _middle-class_ notions; my taste in books and
food and clothes, my sense of honour, my table manners, my turns of
speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body, are the
products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche about
half-way up the social hierarchy. When I grasp this I grasp that it is
no use clapping a proletarian on the back and telling him that he is as
good a man as I am; if I want real contact with him, I have got to make
an effort for which very likely I am unprepared. For to get outside the
class-racket I have got to suppress not merely my private snobbishness,
but most of my other tastes and prejudices as well. I have got to alter
myself so completely that at the end I should hardly be recognizable as
the same person. What is involved is not merely the amelioration of
working-class conditions, nor an avoidance of the more stupid forms of
snobbery, but a complete abandonment of the upper-class and middle-class
attitude to life. And whether I say Yes or No probably depends upon the
extent to which I grasp what is demanded of me.
Many people, however, imagine that they can abolish class-distinctions
without making any uncomfortable change in their own habits and
'ideology'. Hence the eager class-breaking activities which one can see
in progress on all sides. Everywhere there are people of goodwill who
quite honestly believe that they are working for the overthrow of
class-distinctions. The middle-class Socialist enthuses over the
proletariat and runs 'summer schools' where the proletarian and the
repentant bourgeois are supposed to fall upon one another's necks and be
brothers for ever; and the bourgeois visitors come away saying how
wonderful and inspiring it has all been (the proletarian ones come away
saying something different). And then there is the outer-suburban
creeping Jesus, a hangover from the William Morris period, but still
surprisingly common, who goes about saying 'Why must we level _down_?
Why not level up?' and proposes to level the working class 'up' (up to
his own standard) by means of hygiene, fruit-juice, birth-control,
poetry, etc. Even the Duke of York (now King George VI) runs a yearly
camp where public-school boys and boys from the slums are supposed to
mix on exactly equal terms, and _do_ mix for the time being, rather like
the animals in one of those 'Happy Family' cages where a dog, a cat, two
ferrets, a rabbit, and three canaries preserve an armed truce while the
showman's eye is on them.
All such deliberate, conscious efforts at class-breaking are, I am
convinced, a very serious mistake. Sometimes they are merely futile, but
where they do show a definite result it is usually to _intensify_
class-prejudice. This, if you come to think of it, is only what might be
expected. You have forced the pace and set up an uneasy, unnatural
equality between class and class; the resultant friction brings to the
surface all kinds of feelings that might other-wise have remained
buried, perhaps for ever. As I said apropos of Galsworthy, the opinions
of the sentimentalist change into their opposites at the first touch of
reality. Scratch the average pacifist and you find a jingo. The
middle-class I.L.P.'er and the bearded fruit-juice drinker are all for a
classless society so long as they see the proletariat through the wrong
end of the telescope; force them into any _real_ contact with a
proletarian--let them get into a fight with a drunken fish-porter on
Saturday night, for instance--and they are capable of swinging back to
the most ordinary middle-class snobbishness. Most middle-class
Socialists, however, are very unlikely to get into fights with drunken
fish-porters; when they do make a genuine contact with the working
class, it is usually with the working-class intelligentsia. But the
working-class intelligentsia is sharply divisible into two different
types. There is the type who remains working-class--who goes on working
as a mechanic or a dock-labourer or whatever it may be and does not
bother to change his working-class accent and habits, but who 'improves
his mind' in his spare time and works for the I.L.P. or the Communist
Party; and there is the type who does alter his way of life, at least
externally, and who by means of State scholarships succeeds in climbing
into the middle class. The first is one of the finest types of man we
have. I can think of some I have met whom not even the most hidebound
Tory could help liking and admiring. The other type, with exceptions--D.
H. Lawrence, for example--is less admirable.
To begin with, it is a pity, though it is a natural result of the
scholarship system, that the proletariat should tend to interpenetrate
the middle class via the literary intelligentsia. For it is not easy to
crash your way into the literary intelligentsia if you happen to be a
decent human being. The modern English literary world, at any rate the
high-brow section of it, is a sort of poisonous jungle where only weeds
can flourish. It is just possible to be a literary gent and to keep your
decency if you are a definitely _popular_ writer--a writer of detective
stories, for instance; but to be a highbrow, with a footing in the
snootier magazines, means delivering yourself over to horrible campaigns
of wire-pulling and backstairs-crawling. In the highbrow world you 'get
on', if you 'get on' at all, not so much by your literary ability as by
being the life and soul of cocktail parties and kissing the bums of
verminous little lions. This, then, is the world that most readily opens
its doors to the proletarian who is climbing out of his own class. The
'clever' boy of a working-class family, the sort of boy who wins
scholarships and is obviously not fitted for a life of manual labour,
may find other ways of rising into the class above--a slightly different
type, for instance, rises via Labour Party politics--but the literary
way is by far the most usual. Literary London now teems with young men
who are of proletarian origin and have been educated by means of
scholarships. Many of them are very disagreeable people, quite
unrepresentative of their class, and it is most unfortunate that when a
person of bourgeois origin does succeed in meeting a proletarian face to
face on equal terms, this is the type he most commonly meets. For the
result is to drive the bourgeois, who has idealized the proletariat so
long as he knew nothing about them, back into frenzies of snobbishness.
The process is sometimes very comic to watch, if you happen to be
watching it from the outside. The poor well-meaning bourgeois, eager to
embrace his proletarian brother, leaps forward with open arms; and only
a little while later he is in retreat, minus a borrowed five pounds and
exclaiming dolefully, 'But, dash it, the fellow's not a gentleman!'
The thing that disconcerts the bourgeois in a contact of this kind is to
find certain of his own professions being taken seriously. I have
pointed out that the left-wing opinions of the average 'intellectual'
are mainly spurious. From pure imitativeness he jeers at things which in
fact he believes in. As one example out of many, take the public-school
code of honour, with its 'team spirit' and 'Don't hit a man when he's
down', and all the rest of that familiar bunkum. Who has not laughed at
it? Who, calling himself an 'intellectual', would dare _not_ to laugh at
it? But it is a bit different when you meet somebody who laughs at it
_from the outside_; just as we spend our lives in abusing England but
grow very angry when we hear a foreigner saying exactly the same things.
No one has been more amusing about the public schools than 'Beachcomber'
of the _Express_. He laughs, quite rightly, at the ridiculous code which
makes cheating at cards the worst of all sins. But would 'Beachcomber'
like it if one of his own friends was caught cheating at cards? I doubt
it. It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from
yourself that you begin to realize what your own beliefs really are. If
you are a bourgeois 'intellectual' you too readily imagine that you have
somehow become unbourgeois because you find it easy to laugh at
patriotism and the G. of E. and the Old School Tie and Colonel Blimp and
all the rest of it. But from the point of view of the proletarian
'intellectual', who at least by origin is genuinely outside the
bourgeois culture, your resemblances to Colonel Blimp may be more
important than your differences. Very likely he looks upon you and
Colonel Blimp as practically equivalent persons; and in a way he is
right, though neither you nor Colonel Blimp would admit it. So that the
meeting of proletarian and bourgeois, when they do succeed in meeting,
is not always the embrace of long-lost brothers; too often it is the
clash of alien cultures which can only meet in war.
I have been looking at this from the point of view of the bourgeois who
finds his secret beliefs challenged and is driven back to a frightened
conservatism. But one has also got to consider the antagonism that is
aroused in the proletarian 'intellectual'. By his own efforts and
sometimes with frightful agonies he has struggled out of his own class
into another where he expects to find a wider freedom and a greater
intellectual refinement; and all he finds, very often, is a sort of
hollowness, a deadness, a lack of any warm human feeling--of any real
life whatever. Sometimes the bourgeoisie seem to him just dummies with
money and water in their veins instead of blood. This at any rate is
what he _says_, and almost any young highbrow of proletarian origin will
spin you this line of talk. Hence the 'proletarian' cant from which we
now suffer. Everyone knows, or ought to know by this time, how it runs:
the bourgeoisie are 'dead' (a favourite word of abuse nowadays and very
effective be-cause meaningless), bourgeois culture is bankrupt,
bourgeois 'values' are despicable, and so on and so forth; if you want
examples, see any number of the _Left Review_ or any of the younger
Communist writers such as Alee Brown, Philip Henderson, etc. The
sincerity of much of this is suspect, but D. H. Lawrence, who was
sincere, whatever else he may not have been, expresses the same thought
over and over again. It is curious how he harps upon that idea that the
English bourgeoisie are all _dead_, or at least gelded. Mellors, the
gamekeeper in _Lady Chatterley's Lover_ (really Lawrence himself), has
had the opportunity to get out of his own class and does not
particularly want to return to it, because English working people have
various 'disagree-able habits'; on the other hand the bourgeoisie, with
whom he has also mixed to some extent, seem to him half dead, a race of
eunuchs. Lady Chatterley's husband, symbolically, is impotent in the
actual physical sense. And then there is the poem about the young man
(once again Lawrence himself) who 'got up to the top of the tree' but
came down saying:
Oh you've got to be like a monkey
if you climb up the tree!
You've no more use for the solid earth
and the lad you used to be.
You sit in the boughs and gibber
with superiority.
They all gibber and gibber and chatter,
and never a word they say
comes really out of their guts, lad,
they make it up half-way...
I tell you something's been done to 'em,
to the pullets up above;
there's not a cock bird among 'em, etc., etc.
You could hardly have it in plainer terms than that. Possibly by the
people at 'the top of the tree' Lawrence only means the real
bourgeoisie, those in the £2000 a year class and over, but I doubt it.
More probably he means everyone who is more or less within the bourgeois
culture--everyone who was brought up with a mincing accent and in a
house where there were one or two servants. And at this point you
realize the danger of the 'proletarian' cant--realize, I mean, the
terrible antagonism that it is capable of arousing. For when you come to
such an accusation as this, you are up against a blank wall. Lawrence
tells me that because I have been to a public school I am a eunuch.
Well, what about it? I can produce medical evidence to the contrary, but
what good will that do? Lawrence's condemnation remains. If you tell me
I am a scoundrel I may mend my ways, but if you tell me I am a eunuch
you are tempting me to hit back in any way that seems feasible. If you
want to make an enemy of a man, tell him that his ills are incurable.
This then is the net result of most meetings between proletarian and
bourgeois: they lay bare a real antagonism which is intensified by the
'proletarian' cant, itself the product of forced contacts between class
and class. The only sensible procedure is to go slow and not force the
pace. If you secretly think of yourself as a gentleman and as such the
superior of the greengrocer's errand boy, it is far better to say so
than to tell lies about it. Ultimately you have got to drop your
snobbishness, but it is fatal to pretend to drop it before you are
really ready to do so.
Meanwhile one can observe on every side that dreary phenomenon, the
middle-class person who is an ardent Socialist at twenty-five and a
sniffish Conservative at thirty-five. In a way his recoil is natural
enough--at any rate, one can see how his thoughts run. Perhaps a
classless society doesn't mean a beatific state of affairs in which we
shall all go on behaving exactly as before except that there will be no
class-hatred and no snobbishness; perhaps it means a bleak world in
which all our ideals, our codes, our tastes--our 'ideology', in
fact--will have no meaning. Perhaps this class-breaking business isn't
so simple as it looked! On the contrary, it is a wild ride into the
darkness, and it may be that at the end of it the smile will be on the
face of the tiger. With loving though slightly patronizing smiles we set
out to greet our proletarian brothers, and behold! our proletarian
brothers--in so far as we understand them--are not asking for our
greetings, they are asking us to commit suicide. When the bourgeois sees
it in that form he takes to flight, and if his flight is rapid enough it
may carry him to Fascism.
11
Meanwhile what about Socialism?
It hardly needs pointing out that at this moment we are in a very
serious mess, so serious that even the dullest-witted people find it
difficult to remain unaware of it. We are living in a world in which
nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost
impossible to be honest and to remain alive. For enormous blocks of the
working class the conditions of life are such as I have described in the
opening chapters of this book, and there is no chance of those
conditions showing any fundamental improvement. The very best the
English-working class can hope for is an occasional temporary decrease
in unemployment when this or that industry is artificially stimulated
by, for instance, rearmament. Even the middle classes, for the first
time in their history, are feeling the pinch. They have not known actual
hunger yet, but more and more of them find themselves floundering in a
sort of deadly net of frustration in which it is harder and harder to
persuade yourself that you are either happy, active, or useful. Even the
lucky ones at the top, the real bourgeoisie, are haunted periodically by
a consciousness of the miseries below, and still more by fears of the
menacing future. And this is merely a preliminary stage, in a country
still rich with the loot of a hundred years. Presently there may be
coining God knows what horrors--horrors of which, in this sheltered
island, we have not even a traditional knowledge.
And all the while everyone who uses his brain knows that Socialism, as a
world-system and wholeheartedly applied, is a way out. It would at least
ensure our getting enough to eat even if it deprived us of everything
else. Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such elementary
common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established
itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with,
potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must
all cooperate and see to it that every-one does his fair share of the
work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly
obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it
unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.
Yet the fact that we have got to face is that Socialism is not
establishing itself. Instead of going forward, the cause of Socialism is
visibly going back. At this moment Socialists almost everywhere are in
retreat before the onslaught of Fascism, and events are moving at
terrible speed. As I write this the Spanish Fascist forces are
bombarding Madrid, and it is quite likely that before the book is
printed we shall have another Fascist country to add to the list, not to
mention a Fascist control of the Mediterranean which may have the effect
of delivering British foreign policy into the hands of Mussolini. I do
not, however, want here to discuss the wider political issues. What I am
concerned with is the fact that Socialism is losing ground exactly where
it ought to be gaining it. With so much in its favour--for every empty
belly is an argument for Socialism--the _idea_ of Socialism is less
widely accepted than it was ten years ago. The average thinking person
nowadays is not merely not a Socialist, he is actively hostile to
Socialism. This must be due chiefly to mistaken methods of propaganda.
It means that Socialism, in the form of which it is now presented to us,
has about it something inherently distasteful--something that drives
away the very people who ought to be nocking to its support.
A few years ago this might have seemed unimportant. It seems only
yesterday that Socialists, especially orthodox Marxists, were telling me
with superior smiles that Socialism was going to arrive of its own
accord by some mysterious process called 'historic necessity'. Possibly
that belief still lingers, but it has been shaken, to say the least of
it. Hence the sudden attempts of Communists in various countries to ally
themselves with democratic forces which they have been sabotaging for
years past. At a moment like this it is desperately necessary to
discover just _why_ Socialism has failed in its appeal. And it is no use
writing off the current distaste for Socialism as the product of
stupidity or corrupt motives. If you want to remove that distaste you
have got to understand it, which means getting inside the mind of the
ordinary objector to Socialism, or at least regarding his viewpoint
sympathetically. No case is really answered until it has had a fair
hearing. Therefore, rather paradoxically, in order to defend Socialism
it is necessary to start by attacking it.
In the last three chapters I tried to analyse the difficulties that are
raised by our anachronistic class-system; I shall have to touch on that
subject again, because I believe that the present intensely stupid
handling of the class-issue may stampede quantities of potential
Socialists into Fascism. In the chapter following this one I want to
discuss certain underlying assumptions that alienate sensitive minds
from Socialism. But in the present chapter I am merely dealing with the
obvious, preliminary objections--the kind of thing that the person who
is not a Socialist (I don't mean the 'Where's the money to come from?'
type) always starts by saying when you tax him on the subject. Some of
these objections may appear frivolous or self-contradictory, but that is
beside the point; I am merely discussing symptoms. Anything is relevant
which helps to make clear why Socialism is not accepted. And please
notice that I am arguing _for_ Socialism, not _against_ it. But for the
moment I am _advocatus diaboli_. I am making out a case for the sort of
person who is in sympathy with the fundamental aims of Socialism, who
has the brains to see that Socialism would 'work', but who in practice
always takes to flight when Socialism is mentioned.
Question a person of this type, and you will often get the
semi-frivolous answer: 'I don't object to Socialism, but I do object to
Socialists.' Logically it is a poor argument, but it carries weight with
many people. As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for
Socialism is its adherents.
The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism,
in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle
classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine,
a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous
voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years' time
will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to
Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a
white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian
leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all,
with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting. This
last type is surprisingly common in Socialist parties of every shade; it
has perhaps been taken over _en bloc_ from the old Liberal
Party. In addition to this there is the horrible--the really
disquieting--prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered
together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words
'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every
fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature
Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. One day this summer I
was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two
dreadful-looking old men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both
very short, pink, and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was
obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George
style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts
into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could
study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on
top of the bus. The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say,
glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured 'Socialists',
as who should say, 'Red Indians'. He was probably right--the I.L.P. were
holding their summer school at Letchworth. But the point is that to him,
as an ordinary man, a crank meant a Socialist and a Socialist meant a
crank. Any Socialist, he probably felt, could be counted on to have
_something_ eccentric about him. And some such notion seems to exist
even among Socialists themselves. For instance, I have here a prospectus
from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks
me to say 'whether my diet is ordinary or vegetarian'. They take it for
granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question. This kind
of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people.
And their instinct is perfectly sound, for the food-crank is by
definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in
hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a
person but of touch with common humanity.
To this you have got to add the ugly fact that most middle-class
Socialists, while theoretically pining for a class-less society, cling
like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige. I remember my
sensations of horror on first attending an I.L.P. branch meeting in
London. (It might have been rather different in the North, where the
bourgeoisie are less thickly scattered.) Are _these_ mingy little
beasts, I thought, the champions of the working class? For every person
there, male and female, bore the worst stigmata of sniffish middle-class
superiority. If a real working man, a miner dirty from the pit, for
instance, had suddenly walked into their midst, they would have been
embarrassed, angry, and disgusted; some, I should think, would have fled
holding their noses. You can see the same tendency in Socialist
literature, which, even when it is not openly written _de haut en bas_,
is always completely removed from the working class in idiom and manner
of thought. The Coles, Webbs, Stracheys, etc., are not _exactly_
proletarian writers. It is doubtful whether anything describable as
proletarian literature now exists--even the _Daily Worker_ is written in
standard South English--but a good music-hall comedian comes nearer to
producing it than any Socialist writer I can think of. As for the
technical jargon of the Communists, it is as far removed from the common
speech as the language of a mathematical textbook. I remember hearing a
professional Communist speaker address a working-class audience. His
speech was the usual bookish stuff, full of long sentences and
parentheses and 'Notwithstanding' and 'Be that as it may', besides the
usual jargon of 'ideology' and 'class-consciousness' and 'proletarian
solidarity' and all the rest of it. After him a Lancashire working man
got up and spoke to the crowd in their own broad lingo. There was not
much doubt which of the two was nearer to his audience, but I do not
suppose for a moment that the Lancashire working man was an orthodox
Communist.
For it must be remembered that a working man, so long as he remains a
genuine working man, is seldom or never a Socialist in the complete,
logically consistent sense. Very likely he votes Labour, or even
Communist if he gets the chance, but his conception of Socialism is
quite different from that of the, book-trained Socialist higher up. To
the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday
night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter'
hours and nobody bossing you about. To the more revolutionary type, the
type who is a hunger-marcher and is blacklisted by employers, the word
is a sort of rallying-cry against the forces of oppression, a vague
threat of future violence. But, so far as my experience goes, no genuine
working man grasps the deeper implications of Socialism. Often, in my
opinion, he is a truer Socialist than the orthodox Marxist, because he
does remember, what the other so often forgets, that Socialism means
justice and common decency. But what he does not grasp is that Socialism
cannot be narrowed down to mere economic justice' and that a reform of
that magnitude is bound to work immense changes in our civilization and
his own way of life. His vision of the Socialist future is a vision of
present society with the worst abuses left out, and with interest
centring round the same things as at present--family life, the pub,
football, and local politics. As for the philosophic side of Marxism,
the pea-and-thimble trick with those three mysterious entities, thesis,
antithesis, and synthesis, I have never met a working man who had the
faintest interest in it. It is of course true that plenty of people of
working-class _origin_ are Socialists of the theoretical bookish type.
But they are never people who have _remained_ working men; they don't
work with their hands, that is. They belong either to the type I
mentioned in the last chapter, the type who squirms into the middle
class via the literary intelligentsia, or the type who becomes a Labour
M.P. or a high-up trade union official. This last type is one of the
most desolating spectacles the world contains. He has been picked out to
fight for his mates, and all it means to him is a soft job and the
chance of 'bettering' himself. Not merely while but _by_ fighting the
bourgeoisie he becomes a bourgeois himself. And meanwhile it is quite
possible that he has remained an orthodox Marxist. But I have yet to
meet a _working_ miner, steel-worker, cotton-weaver, docker, navvy, or
whatnot who was 'ideologically' sound.
One of the analogies between Communism and Roman Catholicism is that
only the 'educated' are completely orthodox. The most immediately
striking thing about the English Roman Catholics--I don't mean the real
Catholics, I mean the converts: Ronald Knox, Arnold Lunn _et hoc
genus_--is their intense self-consciousness. Apparently they never
think, certainly they never write, about anything but the fact that they
are Roman Catholics; this single fact and the self-praise resulting from
it form the entire stock-in-trade of the Catholic literary man. But the
really interesting thing about these people is the way in which they
have worked out the supposed implications of orthodoxy until the tiniest
details of life are involved. Even the liquids you drink, apparently,
can be orthodox or heretical; hence the campaigns of Chesterton,
'Beachcomber', etc., against tea and in favour of beer. According to
Chesterton, tea-drinking' is 'pagan', while beer-drinking is
'Christian', and coffee is 'the puritan's opium'. It is unfortunate for
this theory that Catholics abound in the 'Temperance' movement and the
greatest tea-boozers in the world are the Catholic Irish; but what I am
interested in here is the attitude of mind that can make even food and
drink an occasion for religious intolerance. A working-class Catholic
would never be so absurdly consistent as that. He does not spend his
time in brooding on the fact that he is a Roman Catholic, and he is not
particularly conscious of being different from his non-Catholic
neighbours. Tell an Irish dock-labourer in the slums of Liverpool that
his cup of tea is 'pagan', and he will call you a fool. And even in more
serious matters he I does not always grasp the implications of his
faith. In the I Roman Catholic homes of Lancashire you see the crucifix
I on the wall and the _Daily Worker_ on the table. It is only the
'educated' man, especially the literary man, who knows how to be a
bigot. And, _mutatis mutandis_, it is the same with Communism. The creed
is never found in its pure form in a genuine proletarian.
It may be said, however, that even if the theoretical book-trained
Socialist is not a working man himself, at least he is actuated by a
love of the working class. He is endeavouring to shed his bourgeois
status and fight on the side of the proletariat--that, obviously, must
be his motive.
But is it? Sometimes I look at a Socialist--the intellectual,
tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and
his Marxian quotation--and wonder what the devil his motive really is.
It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody,
especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the
furthest removed. The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe,
is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs
offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes
freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire,
basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard.
Take the plays of a lifelong Socialist like Shaw. How much understanding
or even awareness of working-class life do they display? Shaw himself
declares that you can only bring a working man on the stage 'as an
object of compassion'; in practice he doesn't bring him on even as that,
but merely as a sort of W. W. Jacobs figure of fun--the ready-made comic
East Ender, like those in _Major Barbara_ and _Captain Brassbound's
Conversion_. At best his attitude to the working class is the sniggering
_Punch_ attitude, in more serious moments (consider, for instance, the
young man who symbolizes the dispossessed classes in _Misalliance_) he
finds them merely contemptible and disgusting. Poverty and, what is
more, the habits of mind created by poverty, are something to be
abolished _from above_, by violence if necessary; perhaps even
preferably by violence. Hence his worship of 'great' men and appetite
for dictatorships, Fascist or Communist; for to him, apparently (_vide_
his remarks apropos of the Italo-Abyssinian war and the Stalin-Wells
conversations), Stalin and Mussolini are almost equivalent persons. You
get the same thing in a more mealy-mouthed form in Mrs Sidney Webb's
autobiography, which gives, unconsciously, a most revealing picture of
the high-minded Socialist slum-visitor. The truth is that, to many
people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a
movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it
means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose
upon 'them', the Lower Orders. On the other hand, it would be a mistake
to regard the book-trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely
incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection
for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred--a sort
of queer, theoretical, _in vacuo_ hatred--against the exploiters. Hence
the grand old Socialist sport of denouncing the bourgeoisie. It is
strange how easily almost any Socialist writer can lash himself into
frenzies of rage against the class to which, by birth or by adoption, he
himself invariably belongs. Sometimes the hatred of bourgeois habits and
'ideology' is so far-reaching that it extends even to bourgeois
characters in books. According to Henri Barbusse, the characters in the
novels of Proust, Gide, etc., are 'characters whom one would dearly love
to have at the other side of a barricade'. 'A barricade', you observe.
Judging from _Le Feu_, I should have thought Barbusse's experience of
barricades had left him with a distaste for them. But the imaginary
bayoneting of 'bourgeois', who presumably don't hit back, is a bit
different from the real article.
The best example of bourgeois-baiting literature that I have yet come
across is Mirsky's _Intelligentsia of Great Britain_. This is a very
interesting and ably-written book, and it should be read by everyone who
wants to understand the rise of Fascism. Mirsky (formerly Prince Mirsky)
was a White Russian _émigré_ who came to England and was for some years
a lecturer in Russian literature at London University. Later he was
converted to Communism, returned to Russia, and produced his book as a
sort of 'show-up' of the British intelligentsia from a Marxist
standpoint. It is a viciously malignant book, with an unmistakable note
of 'Now I'm out of your reach I can say what I like about you' running
all through it, and apart from a general distortion it contains some
quite definite and probably intentional misrepresentation: as, for
instance, when Conrad is declared to be 'no less imperialist than
Kipling', and D. H. Lawrence is described as writing 'bare-bodied
pornography' and as having 'succeeded in erasing all clues to his
proletarian origin'--as though Lawrence had been a pork-butcher climbing
into the House of Lords! This kind of thing is very disquieting when one
remembers that it is addressed to a Russian audience who have no means
of checking its accuracy. But what I am thinking of at the moment is the
effect of such a book on the English public. Here you have a literary
man of aristocratic extraction, a man who had probably never in his life
spoken to a working man on any-thing approaching equal terms, uttering
venomous screams of libel against his 'bourgeois' colleagues. Why? So
far as appearances go, from pure malignity. He is battling _against_ the
British intelligentsia, but what is he battling _for_? Within the book
itself there is no indication. Hence the net effect of books like this
is to give outsiders the impression that there is nothing in Communism
except _hatred_. And here once again you come upon that queer
resemblance between Communism and (convert) Roman Catholicism. If you
want to find a book as evil-spirited as _The Intelligentsia of Great
Britain_, the likeliest place to look is among the popular Roman
Catholic apologists. You will find there the same venom and the same
dishonesty, though, to do the Catholic justice, you will not usually
find the same bad manners. Queer that Comrade Mirsky's spiritual brother
should be Father---! The Communist and the Catholic are not saying the
same thing, in a sense they are even saying opposite things, and each
would gladly boil the other in oil if circumstances permitted; but from
the point of view of an outsider they are very much alike.
The fact is that Socialism, _in the form in which it is now presented_,
appeals chiefly to unsatisfactory or even inhuman types. On the one hand
you have the warm-hearted un-thinking Socialist, the typical
working-class Socialist, who only wants to abolish poverty and does not
always grasp what this implies. On the other hand, you have the
intellectual, book-trained Socialist, who understands that it is
necessary to throw our present civilization down the sink and is quite
willing to do so. And this type is drawn, to begin with, entirely from
the middle class, and from a rootless town-bred section of the middle
class at that. Still more unfortunately, it includes--so much so that to
an outsider it even appears to be composed of--the kind of people I have
been discussing; the foaming denouncers of the bourgeoisie, and the
more-water-in-your-beer reformers of whom Shaw is the prototype, and the
astute young social-literary climbers who are Communists now, as they
will be Fascists five years hence, because it is all the go, and all
that dreary tribe of high-minded' women and sandal-wearers and bearded
fruit-juice drinkers who come nocking towards the smell of 'progress'
like bluebottles to a dead cat. The ordinary decent person, who is in
sympathy with the _essential_ aims of Socialism, is given the impression
that there is no room for his kind in any Socialist party that means
business. Worse, he is driven to the cynical conclusion that Socialism
is a kind of doom which is probably coming but must be staved off as
long as possible. Of course, as I have suggested already, it is not
strictly fair to judge a movement by its adherents; but the point is
that people invariably do so, and that the popular conception of
Socialism is coloured by the conception of a Socialist as a dull or
disagreeable person. 'Socialism' is pictured as a state of affairs in
which our more vocal Socialists would feel thoroughly at home. This does
great harm to the cause. The ordinary man may not flinch from a
dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a
dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight.
There is a widespread feeling that any civilization in which Socialism
was a reality would bear the same relation to our own as a brand-new
bottle of colonial burgundy, bears to a few spoonfuls of first-class
Beaujolais. We live, admittedly, amid the wreck of a civilization, but
it has been a great civilization in its day, and in patches it still
flourishes almost undisturbed. It still has its bouquet, so to speak;
whereas the imagined Socialist future, like the colonial burgundy,
tastes only of iron and water. Hence the fact, which is really a
disastrous one, that artists of any consequence can never be persuaded
into the Socialist fold. This is particularly the case with the writer
whose political opinions are more directly and obviously connected with
his work than those of, say, a painter. If one faces facts one must
admit that nearly everything describable as Socialist literature is
dull, tasteless, and bad. Consider the situation in England at the
present moment. A whole generation has grown up more or less in
familiarity with the idea of Socialism; and yet the higher-water mark,
so to speak, of Socialist literature is W. H. Auden, a sort of gutless
Kipling,[Orwell somewhat retracted this remark later. See 'Inside the
Whale', _England Your England_, p. 120 (Seeker & Warburg Collected
Edition).] and the even feebler poets who are associated with him. Every
writer of consequence and every book worth reading is on the other side.
I am willing to believe that it is otherwise in Russia--about which I
know nothing, however--for presumably in post-revolutionary Russia the
mere violence of events would tend to throw up a vigorous literature of
sorts. But it is certain that in Western Europe Socialism has produced
no literature worth having. A little while ago, when the issues were
less clear, there were writers of some vitality who called themselves
Socialists, but they were using the word as a vague label. Thus, if
Ibsen and Zola described themselves as Socialists, it did not mean much
more than that they were 'progressives', while in the case of Anatole
France it meant merely that he was an anticlerical. The real Socialist
writers, the propagandist writers, have always been dull, empty
windbags--Shaw, Barbusse, Upton Sinclair, William Morris, Waldo Frank,
etc., etc. I am not, of course, suggesting that Socialism is to be
condemned because literary gents don't like it; I am not even suggesting
that it ought necessarily to produce literature on its own account,
though I do think it a bad sign that it has produced no songs worth
singing. I am merely pointing to the fact that writers of genuine
talent are usually indifferent to Socialism, and sometimes actively and
mischievously hostile. And this is a disaster, not only for the writers
themselves, but for the cause of Socialism, which has great need of
them.
This, then, is the superficial aspect of the ordinary man's recoil from
Socialism. I know the whole dreary argument very thoroughly, because I
know it from both sides. Every-thing that I say here I have both said to
ardent Socialists who were trying to convert me, and had said to me by
bored non-Socialists whom I was trying to convert. The whole thing
amounts to a kind of _malaise_ produced by dislike of individual
Socialists, especially of the cocksure Marx-quoting type. Is it childish
to be influenced by that kind of thing? Is it silly? Is it even
contemptible? It is all that, but the point is that _it happens_, and
therefore it is important to keep it in mind.
12
However, there is a much more serious difficulty than the local and
temporary objections which I discussed in the last chapter.
Faced by the fact that intelligent people are so often on the other
side, the Socialist is apt to set it down to corrupt motives (conscious
or unconscious), or to an ignorant belief that Socialism would not
'work', or to a mere dread of the horrors and discomforts of the
revolutionary period before Socialism is established. Undoubtedly all
these are important, but there are plenty of people who are influenced
by none of them and are nevertheless hostile to Socialism. Their reason
for recoiling from Socialism is spiritual, or 'ideological'. They object
to it not on the ground that it would not 'work', but precisely because
it would 'work' too well. What they are afraid of is not the things that
are going to happen in their own lifetime, but the things that are going
to happen in a remote future when Socialism is a reality.
I have very seldom met a convinced Socialist who could grasp that
thinking people may be repelled by the _objective_ towards which
Socialism appears to be moving. The Marxist, especially, dismisses this
kind of thing as bourgeois sentimentality. Marxists as a rule are not
very good at reading the minds of their adversaries; if they were, the
situation in Europe might be less desperate than it is at present.
Possessing a technique which seems to explain everything, they do not
often bother to discover what is going on inside other people's heads.
Here, for instance, is an illustration of the kind of thing I mean.
Discussing the widely held theory--which in one sense is certainly
true--that Fascism is a product of Communism, Mr N. A. Holdaway, one of
the ablest Marxist writers we possess, writes as follows:
The hoary legend of Communism leading to Fascism...The element of
truth in it is this: that the appearance of Communist activity warns the
ruling class that democratic Labour Parties are no longer capable of
holding the working class in check, and that capitalist dictatorship
must assume another form if it is to survive.
You see here the defects of the method. Because he has detected the
underlying economic cause of Fascism, he tacitly assumes that the
spiritual side of it is of no importance. Fascism is written off as a
manoeuvre of the 'ruling class', which at bottom it is. But this in
itself would only explain why Fascism appeals to capitalists. What about
the millions who are not capitalists, who in a material sense have
nothing to gain from Fascism and are often aware of it, and who,
nevertheless, are Fascists? Obviously their approach has been purely
along the ideological line. They could only be stampeded into Fascism
because Communism attacked or seemed to attack certain things
(patriotism, religion, etc.) which lay deeper than the economic motive;
and in _that_ sense it is perfectly true that Communism leads to
Fascism. It is a pity that Marxists nearly always concentrate on letting
economic cats out of ideological bags; it does in one sense reveal the
truth, but with this penalty, that most of their propaganda misses its
mark. It is the spiritual recoil from Socialism, especially as it
manifests itself in sensitive people, that I want to discuss in this
chapter. I shall have to analyse it at some length, because it is very
widespread, very powerful, and, among Socialists, almost completely
ignored.
The first thing to notice is that the idea of Socialism is bound up,
more or less inextricably, with the idea of machine-production.
Socialism is essentially an _urban_ creed. It grew up more or less
concurrently with industrialism, it has always had its roots in the town
proletariat and the town intellectual, and it is doubtful whether it
could ever have arisen in any but an industrial society. Granted
industrialism, the idea of Socialism presents itself naturally, because
private ownership is only tolerable when every individual (or family or
other unit) is at least moderately self-supporting; but the effect of
industrialism is to make it impossible for anyone to be self-supporting
even for a moment. Industrialism, once it rises above a fairly low
level, must lead to some form of collectivism. Not necessarily to
Socialism, of course; conceivably it might lead to the Slave-State of
which Fascism is a kind of prophecy. And the converse is also true.
Machine-production suggests Socialism, but Socialism as a world-system
implies machine-production, because it demands certain things not
compatible with a primitive way of life. It demands, for instance,
constant intercommunication and exchange of goods between all parts of
the earth; it demands some degree of centralized control; it demands an
approximately equal standard of life for all human beings and probably a
certain uniformity of education. We may take it, therefore, that any
world in which Socialism was a reality would be at least as highly
mechanized as the United States at this moment, probably much more so.
In any case, no Socialist would think of denying this. The Socialist
world is always pictured as a completely mechanized, immensely organized
world, depending on the machine as the civilizations of antiquity depend
on the slave.
So far so good, or so bad. Many, perhaps a majority, of thinking people
are not in love with machine-civilization, but everyone who is not a
fool knows that it is nonsense to talk at this moment about scrapping
the machine. But the unfortunate thing is that Socialism, as usually
presented, is bound up with the idea of mechanical progress, not merely
as a necessary development but as an end in itself, almost as a kind of
religion. This idea is implicit in, for instance, most of the
propagandist stuff that is written about the rapid mechanical advance in
Soviet Russia (the Dneiper dam, tractors, etc., etc.). Karel Capek hits
it off well enough in the horrible ending of _R.U.R._, when the Robots,
having slaughtered the last human being, announce their intention to
'build many houses' (just for the sake of building houses, you see). The
kind of person who most readily accepts Socialism is also the kind of
person who views mechanical progress, _as such_, with enthusiasm. And
this is so much the case that Socialists are often unable to grasp that
the opposite opinion exists. As a rule the most persuasive argument they
can think of is to tell you that the present mechanization of the world
is as nothing to what we shall see when Socialism is established. Where
there is one aeroplane now, in those days there will be fifty! All the
work that is now done by hand will then be done by machinery: everything
that is now made of leather, wood, or stone will be made of rubber,
glass, or steel; there will be no disorder, no loose ends, no
wildernesses, no wild animals, no weeds, no disease, no poverty, no
pain--and so on and so forth. The Socialist world is to be above all
things an _ordered_ world, an _efficient_ world. But it is precisely
from that vision of the future as a sort of glittering Wells-world that
sensitive minds recoil. Please notice that this essentially fat-bellied
version of 'progress' is not an integral part of Socialist doctrine; but
it has come to be thought of as one, with the result that the
temperamental conservatism which is latent in all kinds of people is
easily mobilized against Socialism.
Every sensitive person has moments when he is suspicious of machinery
and to some extent of physical science. But it is important to sort out
the various motives, which have differed greatly at different times, for
hostility to science and machinery, and to disregard the jealousy of the
modern literary gent who hates science because science has stolen
literature's thunder. The earliest full-length attack on science and
machinery that I am acquainted with is in the third part of _Gulliver's
Travels_. But Swift's attack, though brilliant as a _tour de force_, is
irrelevant and even silly, because it is written from the
standpoint--perhaps this seems a queer thing to say of the author of
_Gulliver's Travels_--of a man who lacked imagination. To Swift, science
was merely a kind of futile muckraking and the machines were nonsensical
contraptions that would never work. His standard was that of practical
usefulness, and he lacked the vision to see that an experiment which is
not demonstrably useful at the moment may yield results in the future.
Elsewhere in the book he names it as the best of all achievements 'to
make two blades of grass grow where one grew before'; not 'seeing,
apparently, that this is just what the machine can do. A little later
the despised machines began working, physical science increased its
scope, and there came the celebrated conflict between religion and
science which agitated our grandfathers. That conflict is over and both
sides have retreated and claimed a victory, but an anti-scientific bias
still lingers in the minds of most religious believers. All through the
nineteenth century protesting voices were raised against science and
machinery (see Dickens's _Hard Times_, for instance), but usually for
the rather shallow reason that industrialism in its first stages was
cruel and ugly. Samuel Butler's attack on the machine in the well-known
chapter of _Erewhon_ is a different matter. But Butler himself lives in
'a less desperate age than our own, an age in which it was still
possible for a first-rate man to be a dilettante part of the time, and
therefore the whole thing appeared to him as a kind of intellectual
exercise. He saw clearly enough our abject dependence on the machine,
but instead of bothering to work out its consequences he preferred to
exaggerate it for the sake of what was not much more than a joke. It is
only in our own age, when mechanization has finally triumphed, that we
can actually _feel_ the tendency of the machine to make a fully human
life impossible. There is probably no one capable of thinking and
feeling who has not occasionally looked at a gas-pipe chair and
reflected that the machine is the enemy of life. As a rule, however,
this feeling is instinctive rather than reasoned.
People know that in some way or another 'progress' is a swindle, but
they reach this conclusion by a kind of mental shorthand; my job here is
to supply the logical steps that are usually left out. But first one
must ask, what is the function of the machine? Obviously its primary
function is to save work, and the type of person to whom
machine-civilization is entirely acceptable seldom sees any reason for
looking further. Here for instance is a person who claims, or rather
screams, that he is thoroughly at home in the modern mechanized world. I
am quoting from _World Without Faith_, by Mr John Beevers. This is what
he says:
It is plain lunacy to say that the average £2 10s. to £4 a week man of
today is a lower type than an eighteenth-century farm labourer. Or than
the labourer or peasant of any exclusively agricultural community now or
in the past. It just isn't true. It is so damn silly to cry out about
the civilizing effects of work in the fields and farmyards as against
that done in a big locomotive works or an automobile factory. Work is a
nuisance. We work because we have to and all work is done to provide us
with leisure and the means of spending that leisure as enjoyably as
possible.
And again:
Man is going to have time enough and power enough to hunt for his own
heaven on earth without worrying about the super-natural one. The earth
will be so pleasant a place that the priest and the parson won't be left
with much of a tale to tell. Half the stuffing is knocked out of them by
one neat blow. Etc., etc., etc.
There is a whole chapter to this effect (Chapter 4 of Mr Beevers's
book), and it is of some interest as an exhibition of machine-worship in
its most completely vulgar, ignorant, and half-baked form. It is the
authentic voice of a large section of the modern world. Every
aspirin-eater in the outer suburbs would echo it fervently. Notice the
shrill wail of anger ('It just isn't troo-o-o!', etc.) with which Mr
Beevers meets the suggestion that his grandfather may have been a better
man than himself; and the still more horrible suggestion that if we
returned to a simpler way of life he might have to toughen his muscles
with a job of work. Work, you see, is done 'to provide us with leisure'.
Leisure for what? Leisure to become more like Mr Beevers, presumably.
Though as a matter of fact, from that line of talk about 'heaven on
earth', you can make a fairly good guess at what he would like
civilization to be; a sort of Lyons Comer House lasting in _saecula
saeculorum_ and getting bigger and noisier all the time. And in any book
by anyone who feels at home in the machine-world--in any book by H. G.
Wells, for instance--you will find passages of the same kind. How often
have we not heard it, that glutinously uplifting stuff about 'the
machines, our new race of slaves, which will set humanity free', etc.,
etc., etc. To these people, apparently, the only danger of the machine
is its possible use for destructive purposes; as, for instance,
aero-planes are used in war. Barring wars and unforeseen disasters, the
future is envisaged as an ever more rapid march of mechanical progress;
machines to save work, machines to save thought, machines to save pain,
hygiene, efficiency, organization, more hygiene, more efficiency, more
organization, more machines--until finally you land up in the by now
familiar Wellsian Utopia, aptly caricatured by Huxley in _Brave New
World_, the paradise of little fat men. Of course in their day-dreams of
the future the little fat men are neither fat nor little; they are Men
Like Gods. But why should they be? All mechanical progress is towards
greater and greater efficiency; ultimately, therefore, towards a world
in which _nothing goes wrong_. But in a world in which nothing went
wrong, many of the qualities which Mr Wells regards as 'godlike' would
be no more valuable than the animal faculty of moving the ears. The
beings in _Men Like Gods_ and _The Dream_ are represented, for example,
as brave, generous, and physically strong. But in a world from which
physical danger had been banished--and obviously mechanical progress
tends to eliminate danger--would physical courage be likely to survive?
_Could_ it survive? And why should physical strength survive in a world
where there was never the need for physical labour? As for such
qualities as loyalty, generosity, etc., in a world where nothing went
wrong, they would be not only irrelevant but probably unimaginable. The
truth is that many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only
function in opposition to some kind of disaster, pain, or difficulty;
but the tendency of mechanical progress is to eliminate disaster, pain,
and difficulty. In books like _The Dream_ and _Men Like Gods_ it is
assumed that such qualities as strength, courage, generosity, etc., will
be kept alive because they are comely qualities and necessary attributes
of a full human being. Presumably, for instance, the inhabitants of
Utopia would create artificial dangers in order to exercise their
courage, and do dumb-bell exercises to harden muscles which they would
never be obliged to use. And here you observe the huge contradiction
which is usually present in the idea of progress. The tendency of
mechanical progress is to make your environment safe and soft; and yet
you are striving to keep yourself brave and hard. You are at the same
moment furiously pressing forward and desperately holding back. It is as
though a London stockbroker should go to his office in a suit of chain
mail and insist on talking medieval Latin. So in the last analysis the
champion of progress is also the champion of anachronisms.
Meanwhile I am assuming that the tendency of mechanical progress _is_ to
make life safe and soft. This may be disputed, because at any given
moment the effect of some recent mechanical invention may appear to be
the opposite. Take for instance the transition from horses to motor
vehicles. At a first glance one might say, considering the enormous toll
of road deaths, that the motor-car does not exactly tend to make life
safer. Moreover it probably needs as much toughness to be a first-rate
dirt-track rider as to be a broncho-buster or to ride in the Grand
National. Nevertheless the _tendency_ of all machinery is to become
safer and easier to handle. The danger of accidents would disappear if
we chose to tackle our road-planning problem seriously, as we shall do
sooner or later; and meanwhile the motor-car has evolved to a point at
which anyone who is not blind or paralytic can drive it after a few
lessons. Even now it needs far less nerve and skill to drive a car
ordinarily well than to ride a horse ordinarily well; in twenty years'
time it may need no nerve or skill at all. Therefore, one must say that,
taking society as a whole, the result of the transition from horses to
cars has been an increase in human softness. Presently somebody comes
along with another invention, the aeroplane for instance, which does not
at first sight appear to make life safer. The first men who went up in
aeroplanes were superlatively brave, and even today it must need an
exceptionally good nerve to be a pilot. But the same tendency as before
is at work. The aeroplane, like the motor-car, will be made foolproof; a
million engineers are working, almost unconsciously, in that direction.
Finally--this is the objective, though it may never quite be
reached--you will get an aeroplane whose pilot needs no more skill or
courage than a baby needs in its perambulator. And all mechanical
progress is and must be in this direction. A machine evolves by becoming
more efficient, that is, more foolproof; hence the objective of
mechanical progress is a foolproof world--which may or may not mean a
world inhabited by fools. Mr Wells would probably retort that the world
can never become fool-proof, because, however high a standard of
efficiency you have reached, there is always some greater difficulty
ahead. For example (this is Mr Wells's favourite idea--he has used it in
goodness knows how many perorations), when you have got this planet of
ours perfectly into trim, you start upon the enormous task of reaching
and colonizing another. But this is merely to push the objective further
into the future; the objective itself remains the same. Colonize another
planet, and the game of mechanical progress begins anew; for the
foolproof world you have substituted the foolproof solar system--the
foolproof universe. In tying yourself to the ideal of mechanical
efficiency, you tie yourself to the ideal of softness. But softness is
repulsive; and thus all progress is seen to be a frantic struggle
towards an objective which you hope and pray will never be reached. Now
and again, but not often, you meet somebody who grasps that what is
usually called progress also entails what is usually called degeneracy,
and who is nevertheless in favour of progress. Hence the fact that in Mr
Shaw's Utopia a statue was erected to Falstaff, as the first man who
ever made a speech in favour of cowardice.
But the trouble goes immensely deeper than this. Hitherto I have only
pointed out the absurdity of aiming at mechanical progress and also at
the preservation of qualities which mechanical progress makes
unnecessary. The question one has got to consider is whether there is
_any_ human activity which would not be maimed by the dominance of the
machine.
The function of the machine is to save work. In a fully mechanized world
all the dull drudgery will be done by machinery, leaving us free for
more interesting pursuits. So expressed, this sounds splendid. It makes
one sick to see half a dozen men sweating their guts out to dig a trench
for a water-pipe, when some easily devised machine would scoop the earth
out in a couple of minutes. Why not let the machine do the work and the
men go and do something else. But presently the question arises, what
else are they to do? Supposedly they are set free from 'work' in order
that they may do something which is not 'work'. But what is work and
what is not work? Is it work to dig, to carpenter, to plant trees, to
fell trees, to ride, to fish, to hunt, to feed chickens, to play the
piano, to take photographs, to build a house, to cook, to sew, to trim
hats, to mend motor bicycles? All of these things are work to somebody,
and all of them are play to somebody. There are in fact very few
activities which cannot be classed either as work or play according as
you choose to regard them. The labourer set free from digging may want
to spend his leisure, or part of it, in playing the piano, while the
professional pianist may be only too glad to get out and dig at the
potato patch. Hence the antithesis between work, as something
intolerably tedious, and not-work, as something desirable, is false. The
truth is that when a human being is riot eating, drinking, sleeping,
making love, talking, playing games, or merely lounging about--and these
things will not fill up a lifetime--he needs work and usually looks for
it, though he may not call it work. Above the level of a third- or
fourth-grade moron, life has got to be lived largely in terms of effort.
For man is not, as the vulgarer hedonists seem to suppose, a kind of
walking stomach; he has also got a hand, an eye, and a brain. Cease to
use your hands, and you have lopped off a huge chunk of your
consciousness. And now consider again those half-dozen men who were
digging the trench for the water-pipe. A machine has set them free from
digging, and they are going to amuse themselves with something
else--carpentering, for instance. But whatever they want to do, they
will find that another machine has set them free from _that_. For in a
fully mechanized world there would be no more need to carpenter, to
cook, to mend motor bicycles, etc., than there would be to dig. There is
scarcely anything, from catching a whale to carving a cherry stone, that
could not conceivably be done by machinery. The machine would even
encroach upon the activities we now class as 'art'; it is doing so
already, via the camera and the radio. Mechanize the world as fully as
it might be mechanized, and whichever way you turn there will be some
machine cutting you off from the chance of working--that is, of living.
At a first glance this might not seem to matter. Why should you not get
on with your 'creative work' and disregard the machines that would do it
for you? But it is not so simple as it sounds. Here am I, working eight
hours a day in an insurance office; in my spare time I want to do
something 'creative', so I choose to do a bit of carpentering--to make
myself a table, for instance. Notice that from the very start there is a
touch of artificiality about the whole business, for the factories can
turn me out a far better table than I can make for myself. But even when
I get to work on my table, it is not possible for me to feel towards it
as the cabinet-maker of a hundred years ago felt towards his table,
still less as Robinson Crusoe felt towards his. For before I start, most
of the work has already been done for me by machinery. The tools I use
demand the minimum of skill. I can get, for instance, planes which will
cut out any moulding; the cabinet-maker of a hundred years ago would
have had to do the work with chisel and gouge, which demanded real skill
of eye and hand. The boards I buy are ready planed and the legs are
ready turned by the lathe. I can even go to the wood-shop and buy all
the parts of the table ready-made and only needing to be fitted
together; my work being reduced to driving in a few pegs and using a
piece of sandpaper. And if this is so at present, in the mechanized
future it will be enormously more so. With the tools and materials
available _then_, there will be no possibility of mistake, hence no room
for skill. Making a table will be easier and duller than peeling a
potato. In such circumstances it is nonsense to talk of 'creative work'.
In any case the arts of the hand (which have got to be transmitted by
apprenticeship) would long since have disappeared. Some of them have
disappeared already, under the competition of the machine. Look round
any country churchyard and see whether you can find a decently-cut
tombstone later than 1820. The art, or rather the craft, of stonework
has died out so completely that it would take centuries to revive it.
But it may be said, why not retain the machine and retain 'creative
work'? Why not cultivate anachronisms as a spare-time hobby? Many people
have played with this idea; it seems to solve with such beautiful ease
the problems set by the machine. The citizen of Utopia, we are told,
coming home from his daily two hours of turning a handle in the
tomato-canning factory, will deliberately revert to a more primitive way
of life and solace his creative instincts with a bit of fretwork,
pottery-glazing, or handloom-weaving. And why is this picture an
absurdity--as it is, of course? Because of a principle that is not
always recognized, though always acted upon: that so long as the machine
is _there_, one is under an obligation to use it. No one draws water
from the well when he can turn on the tap. One sees a good illustration
of this in the matter of travel. Everyone who has travelled by primitive
methods in an undeveloped country knows that the difference between that
kind of travel and modern travel in trains, cars, etc., is the
difference between life and death. The nomad who walks or rides, with
his baggage stowed on a camel or an ox-cart, may suffer every kind of
discomfort, but at least he is living while he is travelling; whereas
for the passenger in an express train or a luxury liner his journey is
an interregnum, a kind of temporary death. And yet so long as the
railways exist, one has got to travel by train--or by car or aeroplane.
Here am I, forty miles from London. When I want to go up to London why
do I not pack my luggage on to a mule and set out on foot, making a two
days of it? Because, with the Green Line buses whizzing past me every
ten minutes, such a journey would be intolerably irksome. In order that
one may enjoy primitive methods of travel, it is necessary that no other
method should be available. No human being ever wants to do anything in
a more cumbrous way than is necessary. Hence the absurdity of that
picture of Utopians saving their souls with fretwork. In a world where
every-thing could be done by machinery, everything would be done by
machinery. Deliberately to revert to primitive methods to use archaic
took, to put silly little difficulties in your own way, would be a piece
of dilettantism, of pretty-pretty arty and craftiness. It would be like
solemnly sitting down to eat your dinner with stone implements. Revert
to handwork in a machine age, and you are back in Ye Olde Tea Shoppe or
the Tudor villa with the sham beams tacked to the wall.
The tendency of mechanical progress, then, is to frustrate the human
need for effort and creation. It makes unnecessary and even impossible
the activities of the eye and the hand. The apostle of 'progress' will
sometimes declare that this does not matter, but you can usually drive
him into a comer by pointing out the horrible lengths to which the
process can be carried. Why, for instance, use your hands at all--why
use them even for blowing your nose or sharpening a pencil? Surely you
could fix some kind of steel and rubber contraption to your shoulders
and let your arms wither into stumps of skin and bone? And so with every
organ and every faculty. There is really no reason why a human being
should do more than eat, drink, sleep, breathe, and procreate;
_everything_ else could be done for him by machinery. Therefore the
logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the human being to
something resembling a brain in a bottle. That is the goal towards which
we are already moving, though, of course, we have no intention of
getting there; just as a man who drinks a bottle of whisky a day does
not actually intend to get cirrhosis of the liver. The implied objective
of 'progress' is--not _exactly_, perhaps, the brain in the bottle, but
at any rate some frightful subhuman depth of softness and helplessness.
And the unfortunate thing is that at present the word 'progress' and the
word 'Socialism' are linked in-separably in almost everyone's mind. The
kind of person who hates machinery also takes it for granted to hate
Socialism; the Socialist is always in favour of mechanization,
rationalization, modernization--or at least thinks that he ought to be
in favour of them. Quite recently, for instance, a prominent I.L.P.'er
confessed to me with a sort of wistful shame--as though it were
something faintly improper--that he was 'fond of horses'. Horses, you
see, belong to the vanished agricultural past, and all sentiment for the
past carries with it a vague smell of heresy. I do not believe that this
need necessarily be so, but undoubtedly it is so. And in itself it is
quite enough to explain the alienation of decent minds from Socialism.
A generation ago every intelligent person was in some sense a
revolutionary; nowadays it would be nearer the mark to say that every
intelligent person is a reactionary. In this connexion it is worth
comparing H. G. Wells's The Sleeper Awakes with Aldous Huxley's _Brave
New World_, written thirty years later. Each is a pessimistic Utopia, a
vision of a sort of prig's paradise in which all the dreams of the
'progressive' person come true. Considered merely as a piece of
imaginative construction _The Sleeper Awakes_ is, I think, much
superior, but it suffers from vast contradictions because of the fact
that Wells, as the arch-priest of 'progress', cannot write with any
conviction against 'progress'. He draws a picture of a glittering,
strangely sinister world in which the privileged classes live a life of
shallow gutless hedonism, and the workers, reduced to a state of utter
slavery and sub-human ignorance, toil like troglodytes in caverns
underground. As soon as one examines this idea--it is further developed
in a splendid short story in _Stories of Space and Time_--one sees its
inconsistency. For in the immensely mechanized world that Wells is
imagining, why should the workers have to work harder than at present?
Obviously the tendency of the machine is to eliminate work, not to
increase it. In the machine-world the workers might be enslaved,
ill-treated, and even under-fed, but they certainly would not be
condemned to ceaseless manual toil; because in that case what would be
the function of the machine? You can have machines doing all the work or
human beings doing all the work, but you can't have both. Those armies
of underground workers, with their blue uniforms and their debased,
half-human language, are only put in 'to make your flesh creep'. Wells
wants to suggest that 'progress' might take a wrong turning; but the
only evil he cares to imagine is inequality--one class grabbing all the
wealth and power and oppressing the others, apparently out of pure
spite. Give it quite a small twist, he seems to suggest, overthrow the
privileged class--change over from world-capitalism to Socialism, in
fact--and all will be well. The machine-civilization is to continue, but
its products are to be shared out equally. The thought he dare not face
is that the machine itself may be the enemy. So in his more
characteristic Utopias (_The Dream_, _Men Like Gods_, etc.), he returns
to optimism and to a vision of humanity, 'liberated' by the machine, as
a race of enlightened sunbathers whose sole topic of conversation is
their own superiority to their ancestors. _Brave New World_ belongs to a
later time and to a generation which has seen through the swindle of
'progress'. It contains its own contradictions (the most important of
them is pointed out in Mr John Strachey's _The Coming Struggle for
Power_), but it is at least a memorable assault on the more fat-bellied
type of perfectionism. Allowing for the exaggerations of caricature, it
probably expresses what a majority of thinking people feel about
machine-civilization.
The sensitive person's hostility to the machine is in one sense
unrealistic, because of the obvious fact that the machine has come to
stay. But as an attitude of mind there is a great deal to be said for
it. The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to
accept it rather as one accepts a drug--that is, grudgingly and
suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous, and
habit-forming. The oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip
becomes. You have only to look about you at this moment to realize with
what sinister speed the machine is getting us into its power. To begin
with, there is the frightful debauchery of taste that has already been
effected by a century of mechanization. This is almost too obvious and
too generally admitted to need pointing out. But as a single instance,
take taste in its narrowest sense--the taste for decent food. In the
highly mechanized countries, thanks to tinned food, cold storage,
synthetic flavouring matters, etc., the palate is almost a dead organ.
As you can see by looking at any greengrocer's shop, what the majority
of English people mean by an apple is a lump of highly-coloured cotton
wool from America or Australia; they will devour these things,
apparently with pleasure, and let the English apples rot under the
trees. It is the shiny, standardized, machine-made look of the American
apple that appeals to them; the superior taste of the English apple is
something they simply do not notice. Or look at the factory-made,
foil-wrapped cheese and 'blended' butter in any grocer's; look at the
hideous rows of tins which usurp more and more of the space in any
food-shop, even a dairy; look at a sixpenny Swiss roll or a twopenny
ice-cream; look at the filthy chemical by-product that people will pour
down their throats under the name of beer. Wherever you look you will
see some slick machine-made article triumphing over the old-fashioned
article that still tastes of something other than sawdust. And what
applies to food applies also to furniture, houses, clothes, books,
amusements, and everything else that makes up our environment. There are
now millions of people, and they are increasing every year, to whom the
blaring of a radio is not only a more accept-able but a more _normal_
background to their thoughts than the lowing of cattle or the song of
birds. The mechanization of the world could never proceed very far while
taste, even the taste-buds of the tongue, remained uncorrupted, be-cause
in that case most of the products of the machine would be simply
unwanted. In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned foods,
aspirins, gramophones, gaspipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers,
telephones, motor-cars, etc., etc.; and on the other hand there would be
a constant demand for the things the machine cannot produce. But
meanwhile the machine is here, and its corrupting effects are almost
irresistible. One inveighs against it, but one goes on using it. Even a
bare-arse savage, given the chance, will learn the vices of civilization
within a few months. Mechanization leads to the decay of taste, the
decay of taste leads to the demand for machine-made articles and hence
to more mechanization, and so a vicious circle is established.
But in addition to this there is a tendency for the mechanization of the
world to proceed as it were automatically, whether we want it or not.
This is due to the fact that in modern Western man the faculty of
mechanical invention has been fed and stimulated till it has reached
almost the status of an instinct. People invent new machines and improve
existing ones almost unconsciously, rather as a somnambulist will go on
working in his sleep. In the past, when it was taken for granted that
life on this planet is harsh or at any rate laborious, it Seemed the
natural fate to go on using the clumsy implements of your forefathers,
and only a few eccentric persons, centuries apart, proposed innovations;
hence throughout enormous ages such things as the ox-cart, the plough,
the sickle, etc., remained radically unchanged. It is on record that
screws have been in use since remote antiquity and yet that it was not
till the middle of the nineteenth century that anyone thought of making
screws with points on them, for several thousand years they remained
flat-ended and holes had to be drilled for them before they could be
inserted. In our own epoch such a thing would be unthinkable. For almost
every modern Western man has his inventive faculty to some extent
developed; the Western man invents machines as naturally as the
Polynesian islander swims. Give a Western man a job of work and he
immediately begins devising a machine that would do it for him; give him
a machine and he thinks of ways of improving it. I understand this
tendency well enough, for in an ineffectual sort of way I have that type
of mind myself. I have not either the patience or the mechanical skill
to devise any machine that would work, but I am perpetually seeing, as
it were, the ghosts of possible machines that might save me the trouble
of using my brain or muscles. A person with a more definite mechanical
turn would probably construct some of them and put them into operation.
But under our present economic system, whether he constructed them--or
rather, whether anyone else had the benefit of them--would depend upon
whether they were commercially valuable. The Socialists are right,
therefore, when they claim that the rate of mechanical progress will be
much more rapid once Socialism is established. Given a mechanical
civilization the process of invention and improvement will always
continue, but the tendency of capitalism is to slow it down, because
under capitalism any invention which does not promise fairly immediate
profits is neglected; some, indeed, which threaten to reduce profits are
suppressed almost as ruthlessly as the flexible glass mentioned by
Petronius.[For example: Some years ago someone invented a gramophone
needle that would last for decades. One of the big gramophone companies
bought up the patent rights, and that was the last that was ever beard
of it.] Establish Socialism--remove the profit principle--and the
inventor will have a free hand. The mechanization of the world, already
rapid enough, would be or at any rate could be enormously accelerated.
And this prospect is a slightly sinister one, because it is obvious even
now that the process of mechanization is out of control. It is happening
merely because humanity has got the habit. A chemist perfects a new
method of synthesizing rubber, or a mechanic devises a new pattern of
gudgeon-pin. Why? Not for any clearly understood purpose, but simply
from the impulse to invent and improve, which has now become
instinctive. Put a pacifist to work in a bomb-factory and in two months
he will be devising a new type of bomb. Hence the appearance of such
diabolical things as poison gases, which are not expected even by their
inventors to be beneficial to humanity. Our attitude towards such things
as poison gases _ought_ to be the attitude of the king of Brobdingnag
towards gunpowder; but because we live in a mechanical and scientific
age we are infected with the notion that, whatever else happens,
'progress' must continue and knowledge must never be suppressed.
Verbally, no doubt, we would agree that machinery is made for man and
not man for machinery; in practice any attempt to check the development
of the machine appears to us an attack on knowledge and therefore a kind
of blasphemy. And even if the whole of humanity suddenly revolted
against the machine and decided to escape to a simpler way of life, the
escape would still be immensely difficult. It would not do, as in
Butler's _Erewhon_, to smash every machine invented after a certain
date; we should also have to smash the habit of mind that would, almost
involuntarily, devise fresh machines as soon as the old ones were
smashed. And in all of us there is at least a tinge of that habit of
mind. In every country in the world the large army of scientists and
technicians, with the rest of us panting at their heels, are marching
along the road of 'progress' with the blind persistence of a column of
ants. Comparatively few people want it to happen, plenty of people
actively want it not to happen, and yet it is happening. The process of
mechanization has itself become a machine, a huge glittering vehicle
whirling us we are not certain where, but probably towards the padded
Wells-world and the brain in the bottle.
This, then, is the case against the machine. Whether it is a sound or
unsound case hardly matters. The point is that these or very Similar
arguments would be echoed by every person who is hostile to
machine-civilization. And unfortunately, because of that nexus of thought,
'Socialism-progress-machinery-Russia-tractor-hygiene-machinery-progress',
which exists in almost everyone's mind, it is usually the _same_ person
who is hostile to Socialism. The kind of person who hates central
heating and gaspipe chairs is also the kind of person who, when you
mention Socialism, murmurs something about' beehive state' and moves
away with a pained expression. So far as my observation goes, very few
Socialists grasp why this _is_ so, or even that it is so. Get the more
vocal type of Socialist into a comer, repeat to him the substance of
what I have said in this chapter, and see what kind of answer you get.
As a matter of fact you will get several answers; I am so familiar with
them that I know them almost by heart.
In the first place he will tell you that it is impossible to 'go back'
(or to 'put back the hand of progress'--as though the hand of progress
hadn't been pretty violently put back several times in human history!),
and will then accuse you of being a medievalist and begin to descant
upon the horrors of the Middle Ages, leprosy, the Inquisition, etc. As a
matter of fact, most attacks upon the Middle Ages and the past generally
by apologists of modernity are beside the point, because their essential
trick is to project a modern man, with his squeamishness and his high
standards of comfort, into an age when such things were unheard of. But
notice that in any case this is not an answer. For a dislike of the
mechanized future does not imply the smallest reverence for any period
of the past. D. H. Lawrence, wiser than the medievalist, chose to
idealize the Etruscans about whom we know conveniently little. But there
is no need to idealize even the Etruscans or the Pelasgians, or the
Aztecs, or the Sumerians, or any other vanished and romantic people.
When one pictures a desirable civilization, one pictures it merely as an
objective; there is no need to pretend that it has ever existed in space
and time. Press this point home, explain that you wish to aim at making
life simpler and harder instead of softer and more complex, and the
Socialist will usually assume that you want to revert to a 'state of
nature'--meaning some stinking palaeolithic cave: as though there were
nothing between a flint scraper and the steel mills of Sheffield, or
between a skin coracle and the _Queen Mary_.
Finally, however, you will get an answer which is rather more to the
point and which runs roughly as follows: 'Yes, what you are saying is
all very well in its way. No doubt it would be very noble to harden
ourselves and do without aspirins and central heating and so forth. But
the point is, you see, that nobody seriously wants it. It would mean
going back to an agricultural way of life, which means beastly hard work
and isn't at all the same thing as playing at gardening. I don't want
hard work, you don't want hard work--nobody wants it who knows what it
means. You only talk as you do because you've never done a day's work in
your life,' etc., etc.
Now this in a sense is true. It amounts to saying, 'We're soft--for
God's sake let's stay soft!' which at least is realistic. As I have
pointed out already, the machine has got us in its grip and to escape
will be immensely difficult. Nevertheless this answer is really an
evasion, because it fails to make dear what we mean when we say that we
'want' this or that. I am a degenerate modern semi-intellectual who
would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my _New
Statesman_ every Friday. Clearly I do not, in a sense, 'want' to return
to a simpler, harder, probably agricultural way of life. In the same
sense I don't 'want' to cut down my drinking, to pay my debts, to take
enough exercise, to be faithful to my wife, etc., etc. But in another
and more permanent sense I do want these things, and perhaps in the same
sense I want a civilization in which 'progress' is not definable as
making the world safe for little fat men. These that I have outlined are
practically the only arguments that I have been able to get from
Socialists--thinking, book-trained Socialists--when I have tried to
explain to them just _how_ they are driving away possible adherents. Of
course there is also the old argument that Socialism is going to arrive
anyway, whether people like it or not, because of that trouble-saving
thing, 'historic necessity'. But 'historic necessity', or rather the
belief in it, has failed to survive Hitler.
Meanwhile the thinking person, by intellect usually left-wing but by
temperament often right-wing, hovers at the gate of the Socialist fold.
He is no doubt aware that he ought to be a Socialist. But he observes
first the dullness of individual Socialists, then the apparent
flabbiness of Socialist ideals, and veers away. Till quite recently it
was natural to veer towards indifferentism. Ten years ago, even five
years ago, the typical literary gent wrote books on baroque architecture
and had a soul above politics. But that attitude is becoming difficult
and even unfashionable. The times are growing harsher, the issues are
clearer, the belief that nothing, will ever change (i.e. that your
dividends will always be safe) is less prevalent. The fence on which the
literary gent sits, once as comfortable as the plush cushion of a
cathedral stall, is now pinching his bottom intolerably; more and more
he shows a disposition to drop off on one side or the other. It is
interesting to notice how many of our leading writers, who a dozen years
ago were art for art's saking for all they were worth and would have
considered it too vulgar for words even to vote at a general election,
are now taking a definite political standpoint; while most of the
younger writers, at least those of them who are not mere footlers, have
been 'political' from the start. I believe that when the pinch comes
there is a terrible danger that the main movement of the intelligentsia
will be towards Fascism. Just how soon the pinch will come it is
difficult to say; it depends, probably, upon events in Europe; but it
may be that within two years or even a year we shall have reached the
decisive moment. That will also be the moment when every person with any
brains or any decency will know in his bones that he ought to be on the
Socialist side. But he will not necessarily come there of his own
accord; there are too many ancient prejudices standing in the way. He
will have to be persuaded, and by methods that imply an understanding of
his viewpoint. Socialists cannot afford to waste any more time in
preaching to the converted. Their job now is to make Socialists as
rapidly as possible; instead of which, all too often, they are making
Fascists.
When I speak of Fascism in England, I am not necessarily thinking of
Mosley and his pimpled followers. English Fascism, when it arrives, is
likely to be of a sedate and subtle kind (presumably, at any rate at
first, it won't be _called_ Fascism), and it is doubtful whether a
Gilbert and Sullivan heavy dragoon of Mosley's stamp would ever be much
more than a joke to the majority of English people; though even Mosley
will bear watching, for experience shows (_vide_ the careers of Hitler,
Napoleon III) that to a political climber it is sometimes an advantage
not to be taken too seriously at the beginning of his career. But what I
am thinking of at this moment is the Fascist attitude of mind, which
beyond any doubt is gaining ground among people who ought to know
better. Fascism as it appears in the intellectual is a sort of
mirror-image--not actually of Socialism but of a plausible travesty of
Socialism. It boils down to a determination to do the _opposite_ of
whatever the mythical Socialist does. If you present Socialism in a bad
and misleading light--if you let people imagine that it does not mean
much more than pouring European civilization down the sink at the
command of Marxist prigs--you risk driving the intellectual into
Fascism. You frighten him into a sort of angry defensive attitude in
which he simply refuses to listen to the Socialist case. Some such
attitude is already quite clearly discernible in writers like Pound,
Wyndham Lewis, Roy Campbell, etc., in most of the Roman Catholic writers
and many of the Douglas Credit group, in certain popular novelists, and
even, if one looks below the surface, in so-superior conservative
highbrows like Eliot and his countless followers. If you want some
unmistakable illustrations of the growth of Fascist feeling in England,
have a look at some of the innumerable letters that were written to the
Press during the Abyssinian war, approving the Italian action, and also
the howl of glee that went up from both Catholic and Anglican pulpits
(see the _Daily Mail_ of 17 August 1936) over the Fascist rising in
Spain.
In order to combat Fascism it is necessary to understand it, which
involves admitting that it contains some good as well as much evil. In
practice, of course, it is merely an infamous tyranny, and its methods
of attaining and holding power are such that even its most ardent
apologists prefer to talk about something else. But the underlying
feeling of Fascism, the feeling that first draws people into the Fascist
camp, may be less contemptible. It is not _always_, as the _Saturday
Review_ would lead one to suppose, a squealing terror of the Bolshevik
bogey-man. Everyone who has given the movement so much as a glance knows
that the rank-and-file Fascist is often quite a well-meaning
person--quite genuinely anxious, for instance, to better the lot of the
unemployed. But more important than this is the fact that Fascism draws
its strength from the good as well as the bad varieties of conservatism.
To anyone with a feeling for tradition and for discipline it comes with
its appeal ready-made. Probably it is very easy, when you have had a
bellyful of the more tactless kind of Socialist propaganda, to see
Fascism as the last line defence of all that is good in European
civilization. Even the Fascist bully at his symbolic worst, with rubber
truncheon in one hand and castor oil bottle in the other, does not
necessarily feel himself a bully; more probably he feels like Roland in
the pass at Roncevaux, defending Christendom against the barbarian. We
have got to admit that if Fascism is everywhere advancing, this is
largely the fault of Socialists themselves. Partly it is due to the
mistaken Communist tactic of sabotaging democracy, i.e. sawing off the
branch you are sitting on; but still more to the fact that Socialists
have, so to speak, presented their case wrong side foremost. They have
never made it sufficiently clear that the essential aims of Socialism
are justice and liberty. With their eyes glued to economic facts, they
have proceeded on the assumption that man has no soul, and explicitly or
implicitly they have set up the goal of a materialistic Utopia. As a
result Fascism has been able to play upon every instinct that revolts
against hedonism and a cheap conception of 'progress'. It has been able
to pose as the upholder of the European tradition, and to appeal to
Christian belief, to patriotism, and to the military virtues. It is far
worse than useless to write Fascism off as 'mass sadism', or some easy
phrase of that kind. If you pretend that it is merely an aberration
which will presently pass off of its own accord, you are dreaming a
dream from which you will awake when somebody coshes you with a rubber
truncheon. The only possible course is to examine the Fascist case,
grasp that there is something to be said for it, and then make it clear
to the world that whatever good Fascism contains is also implicit in
Socialism.
At present the situation is desperate. Even if nothing worse befalls us,
there are the conditions which I described in the earlier part of this
book and which are not going to improve under our present economic
system. Still more urgent is the danger of Fascist domination in Europe.
And unless Socialist doctrine, in an effective form, can be diffused
widely and very quickly, there is no certainty that Fascism will ever be
overthrown. For Socialism is the only real enemy that Fascism has to
face. The capitalist-imperialist governments, even though they
themselves are about to be plundered, will not fight with any conviction
against Fascism as such. Our rulers, those of them who understand the
issue, would probably prefer to hand over every square inch of the
British Empire to Italy, Germany, and Japan than to see Socialism
triumphant. It was easy to laugh at Fascism when we imagined that it was
based on hysterical nationalism, because it seemed obvious that the
Fascist states, each regarding itself as the chosen people and patriotic
_contra mundum_, would clash with one another. But nothing of the kind
is happening. Fascism is now an international movement, which means not
only that the Fascist nations can combine for purposes of loot, but that
they are groping, perhaps only half consciously as yet, towards a
world-system. For the vision of the totalitarian state there is being
substituted the vision of the totalitarian world. As I pointed out
earlier, the advance of machine-technique must lead ultimately to some
form of collectivism, but that form need not necessarily be
equalitarian; that is, it need not be Socialism. _Pace_ the economists,
it is quite easy to imagine a world-society, economically
collectivist--that is, with the profit principle eliminated--but with
all political, military, and educational power in the hands of a small
caste of rulers and their bravos. That or something like it is the
objective of Fascism. And that, of course, is the slave-state, or rather
the slave-world; it would probably be a stable form of society, and the
chances are, considering the enormous wealth of the world if
scientifically exploited, that the slaves would be well-fed and
contented. It is usual to speak of the Fascist objective as the 'beehive
state', which does a grave injustice to bees. A world of rabbits ruled
by stoats would be nearer the mark. It is against this beastly
possibility that we have got to combine.
The only thing _for_ which we can combine is the underlying ideal of
Socialism; justice and liberty. But it is hardly strong enough to call
this ideal 'underlying'. It is almost completely forgotten. It has been
buried beneath layer after layer of doctrinaire priggishness, party
squabbles, and half-baked 'progressivism' until it is like a diamond
hidden under a mountain of dung. The job of the Socialist is to get it
out again. Justice and liberty! _Those_ are the words that have got to
ring like a bugle across the world. For a long time past, certainly for
the last ten years, the devil has had all the best tunes. We have
reached a stage when the very word 'Socialism' calls up, on the one
hand, a picture of aeroplanes, tractors, and huge glittering factories
of glass and concrete; on the other, a picture of vegetarians with
wilting beards, of Bolshevik commissars (half gangster, half
gramophone), of earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing
polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth-control fanatics, and Labour Party
backstairs-crawlers. Socialism, at least in this island, does not smell
any longer of revolution and the overthrow of tyrants; it smells of
crankishness, machine-worship, and the stupid cult of Russia. Unless you
can remove that smell, and very rapidly, Fascism may win.
13
And finally, is there anything one can do about it?
In the first part of this book I illustrated, by a few brief
sidelights, the kind of mess we are in; in this second part I have been
trying to explain why, in my opinion, so many normal decent people are
repelled by the only remedy, namely by Socialism. Obviously the most urgent
need of the next few years is to capture those normal decent ones before
Fascism plays its trump card. I do not want to raise here the question of
parties and political expedients. More important than any party label
(though doubtless the mere menace of Fascism will presently bring some kind
of Popular Front into existence) is the diffusion of Socialist doctrine in
an effective form. People have got to be made ready to act as Socialists.
There are, I believe, countless people who, without being aware of it, are
in sympathy with the essential aims of Socialism, and who could be won over
almost with-out a struggle if only one could find the word that would move
them. Everyone who knows the meaning of poverty, everyone who has a genuine
hatred of tyranny and war, is on the Socialist side, potentially. My job
here, therefore, is to suggest--necessarily in very general terms--how
a reconciliation might be effected between Socialism and its more
intelligent enemies.
First, as to the enemies themselves--I mean all those people who
grasp that capitalism is evil but who are conscious of a sort of queasy,
shuddering sensation when Socialism is mentioned. As I have pointed out,
this is traceable to two main causes. One is the personal inferiority of
many individual Socialists; the other is the fact that Socialism is too
often coupled with a fat-bellied, godless conception of 'progress' which
revolts anyone with a feeling for tradition or the rudiments of an
aesthetic sense. Let me take the second point first.
The distaste for 'progress' and machine-civilization which is so common
among sensitive people is only defensible as an attitude of mind. It is
not valid as a reason for rejecting Socialism, because it presupposes an
alternative which does not exist. When you say, 'I object to
mechanization and standardization--therefore I object to Socialism', you
are saying in effect, 'I am free to do without the machine if I choose',
which is nonsense. We are all dependent upon the machine, and if the
machines stopped working most of us would die. You may hate the
machine-civilization, probably you are right to hate it, but for the
present there can be no question of accepting or rejecting it. The
machine-civilization _is here_, and it can only be criticized from the
inside, because all of us are inside it. It is only romantic fools who
natter themselves that they have escaped, like the literary gent in his
Tudor cottage with bathroom h. and c., and the he-man who goes off to
live a 'primitive' life in the jungle with a Mannlicher rifle
and four wagon-loads of tinned food. And almost certainly the
machine-civilization will continue to triumph. There is no reason to
think that it will destroy itself or stop functioning of its own accord.
For some time past it has been fashionable to say that war is presently
going to 'wreck civilization' altogether; but, though the next
full-sized war will certainly be horrible enough to make all previous
ones seem a joke, it is immensely unlikely that it will put a stop to
mechanical progress. It is true that a very vulnerable country like
England, and perhaps the whole of western Europe, could be reduced to
chaos by a few thousand well-placed bombs, but no war is at present
thinkable which could wipe out industrialization in all countries
simultaneously. We may take it that the return to a simpler, free, less
mechanized way of life, however desirable it may be, is not going to
happen. This is not fatalism, it is merely acceptance of facts. It is
meaningless to oppose Socialism on the ground that you object to the
beehive State, for the beehive State _is here_. The choice is not, as
yet, between a human and an inhuman world. It is simply between
Socialism and Fascism, which at its very best is Socialism with the
virtues left out.
The job of the thinking person, therefore, is not to reject Socialism
but to make up his mind to humanize it. Once Socialism is in a way to
being established, those who can see through the swindle of 'progress'
will probably find themselves resisting. In fact, it is their special
function to do so. In the machine-world they have got to be a sort of
permanent opposition, which is not the same thing as being an
obstructionist or a traitor. But in this I am speaking of the future.
For the moment the only possible course for any decent person, however
much of a Tory or an anarchist by temperament, is to work for the
establishment of Socialism. Nothing else can save us from the misery of
the present or the nightmare of the future. To oppose Socialism now,
when twenty million Englishmen are underfed and Fascism has conquered
half Europe, is suicidal. It is like starting a civil war when the Goths
are crossing the frontier.
Therefore it is all the more important to get rid of that mere nervous
prejudice against Socialism which is not founded on any serious
objection. As I have pointed out already, many people who are not
repelled by Socialism are repelled by Socialists. Socialism, as now
presented, is unattractive largely because it appears, at any rate from
the outside, to be the plaything of cranks, doctrinaires, parlour
Bolsheviks, and so forth. But it is worth remembering that this is only
so because the cranks, doctrinaires, etc., have been allowed to get
there first J if the movement were invaded by better brains and more
common decency, the objectionable types would cease to dominate it. For
the present one must just set one's teeth and ignore them; they will
loom much smaller when the movement has been humanized. Besides, they
are irrelevant. We have got to fight for justice and liberty, and
Socialism does mean justice and liberty when the nonsense is stripped
off it. It is only the essentials that are worth remembering. To recoil
from Socialism because so many individual Socialists are inferior people
is as absurd as refusing to travel by train because you dislike the
ticket-collector's face.
And secondly, as to the Socialist himself--more especially the vocal,
tract-writing type of Socialist.
We are at a moment when it is desperately necessary for left-wingers of
all complexions to drop their differences and hang together. Indeed this
is already happening to a small extent. Obviously, then, the more
intransigent kind of Socialist has now got to ally himself with people
who are not in perfect agreement with him. As a rule he is rightly
unwilling to do so, because he sees the very real danger of watering the
whole Socialist movement down to some kind of pale-pink humbug even more
ineffectual than the parliamentary Labour Party. At the moment, for
instance, there is great danger that the Popular Front which Fascism
will presumably bring into existence will not be genuinely Socialist in
character, but will simply be a manoeuvre against German and Italian
(not English) Fascism. Thus the need to unite against Fascism might draw
the Socialist into alliance with his very worst enemies. But the
principle to go upon is this: that you are never in danger of allying
yourself with the wrong people provided that you keep the essentials of
your movement in the foreground. And what are the essentials of
Socialism? What is the mark of a real Socialist? I suggest that the real
Socialist is one who wishes--not merely conceives it as desirable, but
actively wishes--to see tyranny overthrown. But I fancy that the
majority of orthodox Marxists would not accept that definition, or would
only accept it very grudgingly. Sometimes, when I listen to these people
talking, and still more when I read their books, I get the impression
that, to them, the whole Socialist movement is no more than a kind of
exciting heresy-hunt--a leaping to and fro of frenzied witch-doctors to
the beat of tom-toms and the tune of 'Fee fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood
of a right-wing deviationist!' It is because of this kind of thing that
it is so much easier to feel yourself a Socialist when you are among
working-class people. The working-class Socialist, like the
working-class Catholic, is weak on doctrine and can hardly open his
mouth without uttering a heresy, but he has the heart of the matter in
him. He does grasp the central fact that Socialism means the overthrow
of tyranny, and the 'Marseillaise', if it were translated for his
benefit, would appeal to him more deeply than any learned treatise on
dialectical materialism. At this moment it is waste of time to insist
that acceptance of Socialism means acceptance of the philosophic side of
Marxism, plus adulation of Russia. The Socialist movement has not time
to be a league of dialectical materialists; it has got to be a league of
the oppressed against the oppressors. You have got to attract the man
who means business, and you have got to drive away the mealy-mouthed
Liberal who wants foreign Fascism destroyed in order that he may go on
drawing his dividends peacefully--the type of hum-bug who passes
resolutions 'against Fascism and Communism', i.e. against rats and
rat-poison. Socialism means the overthrow of tyranny, at home as well as
abroad. So long as you keep _that_ fact well to the front, you will
never be in much doubt as to who are your real supporters. As for minor
differences--and the profoundest philosophical difference is unimportant
compared with saving the twenty million Englishmen whose bones are
rotting from malnutrition--the time to argue about them is afterwards.
I do not think the Socialist need make any sacrifice of essentials, but
certainly he will have to make a great sacrifice of externals. It would
help enormously, for instance, if the smell of crankishness which still
clings to the Socialist movement could be dispelled. If only the sandals
and the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and
every vegetarian, teetotaller, and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn
Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly! But that, I am afraid, is
not going to happen. What _is_ possible, however, is for the more
intelligent kind of Socialist to stop alienating possible supporters in
silly and quite irrelevant ways. There are so many minor priggishness
which could so easily be dropped. Take for instance the dreary attitude
of the typical Marxist towards literature. Out of the many that come
into my mind, I will give just one example. It sounds trivial, but it
isn't. In the old _Worker's Weekly_ (one of the forerunners of the
_Daily Worker_) there used to be a column of literary chat of the 'Books
on the Editor's Table' type. For several weeks miming there had been a
certain amount of talk about Shakespeare; whereupon an incensed reader
wrote to say, 'Dear Comrade, we don't want to hear about these bourgeois
writers like Shakespeare. Can't you give us something a bit more
proletarian?' etc., etc. The editor's reply was simple. 'If you will
turn to the index of Marx's _Capital_,' he wrote, 'you will find that
Shakespeare is mentioned several times.' And please notice that this was
enough to silence the objector. Once Shakespeare had received the
benediction of Marx, he became respectable. _That_ is the mentality that
drives ordinary sensible people away from the Socialist movement. You do
not need to care about Shakespeare to be repelled by that kind of thing.
Again, there is the horrible jargon that nearly all Socialists think it
necessary to employ. When the ordinary person hears phrases like
'bourgeois ideology' and 'proletarian solidarity' and 'expropriation of
the expropriators', he is not inspired by them, he is merely disgusted.
Even the single word 'Comrade' has done its dirty little bit towards
discrediting the Socialist movement. How many a waverer has halted on
the brink, gone perhaps to some public meeting and watched
self-conscious Socialists dutifully addressing one another as 'Comrade',
and then slid away, disillusioned, into the nearest four-ale bar! And
his instinct is sound; for where is the sense of sticking on to yourself
a ridiculous label which even after long practice can hardly be
mentioned without a gulp of shame? It is fatal to let the ordinary
inquirer get away with the idea that being a Socialist means wearing
sandals and burbling about dialectical materialism. You have got to make
it clear that there is room in the Socialist movement for human beings,
or the game is up.
And this raises a great difficulty. It means that the issue of class, as
distinct from mere economic status, has got to be faced more
realistically than it is being faced at present.
I devoted three chapters to discussing the class-difficulty. The
principal fact that will have emerged, I think, is that though the
English class-system has outlived its usefulness, it _has_ outlived it
and shows no signs of dying. It greatly confuses the issue to assume, as
the orthodox Marxist so often does (see for instance Mr Alee Brown's in
some ways interesting book. _The Fate of the Middle Classes_), that
social status is determined solely by income. Economically, no doubt,
there are only two classes, the rich and the poor, but socially there is
a whole hierarchy of classes, and the manners and traditions learned by
each class in childhood are not only very different but--this is the
essential point--generally persist from birth to death. 'Hence the
anomalous individuals that you find in every class of society. You find
writers like Wells and Bennett who have grown immensely rich and have
yet preserved intact their lower-middle-class Nonconformist prejudices;
you find millionaires who cannot pronounce their aitches; you find petty
shopkeepers whose income is far lower than that of the bricklayer and
who, nevertheless, consider themselves (and are considered) the
bricklayer's social superiors; you find board-school boys ruling Indian
provinces and public-school men touting vacuum cleaners. If social
stratification corresponded precisely to economic stratification, the
public-school man would assume a cockney accent the day his income
dropped below £200 a year. But does he? On the contrary, he immediately
becomes twenty times more Public School than before. He clings to the
Old School Tie as to a life-line. And even the aitchless millionaire,
though sometimes he goes to an elocutionist and learns a B.B.C. accent,
seldom succeeds in disguising himself as completely as he would like to.
It is in fact very difficult to escape, culturally, from the class into
which you have been born.
As prosperity declines, social anomalies grow commoner. You don't get
more aitchless millionaires, but you do get more and more public-school
men touting vacuum cleaners and more and more small shopkeepers driven
into the workhouse. Large sections of the middle class are being
gradually proletarianized; but the important point is that they do not,
at any rate in the first generation, adopt a proletarian outlook. Here
am I, for instance, with a bourgeois upbringing and a working-class
income. Which class do I belong to? Economically I belong to the working
class, but it is almost impossible for me to think of myself as anything
but a member of the bourgeoisie. And supposing I had to take sides, whom
should I side with, the upper class which is trying to squeeze me out of
existence, or the working class whose manners are not my manners? It is
probable that I personally, in any important issue, would side with the
working class. But what about the tens or hundreds of thousands of
others who are in approximately the same position? And what about that
far larger class, running into millions this time--the office-workers
and black-coated employees of all kinds--whose traditions are less
definitely middle class but who would certainly not thank you if you
called them proletarians? All of these people have the same interests
and the same enemies as the working class. All are being robbed and
bullied by the same system. Yet how many of them realize it? When the
pinch came nearly all of them would side with their oppressors and
against those who ought to be their allies. It is quite easy to imagine
a middle class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still
remaining bitterly anti-working-class in sentiment; this being, of
course, a ready-made Fascist Party.
Obviously the Socialist movement has got to capture the exploited middle
class before it is too late; above all it must capture the
office-workers, who are so numerous and, if they knew how to combine, so
powerful. Equally obviously it has so far failed to do so. The very last
person in whom you can hope to find revolutionary opinions is a clerk or
a commercial traveller. Why? Very largely, I think, because of the
'proletarian' cant with which Socialist propaganda is mixed up. In order
to symbolize the class war, there has been set up the more or less
mythical figure of a 'proletarian', a muscular but downtrodden man in
greasy overalls, in contradistinction to a 'capitalist', a fat, wicked
man in a top hat and fur coat. It is tacitly assumed that there is no
one in between; the truth being, of course, that in a country like
England about a quarter of the population is in between. If you are
going to harp on the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', it is an
elementary precaution to start by explaining who the proletariat _are_.
But because of the Socialist tendency to idealize the manual worker as
such, this has never been made sufficiently clear. How many of the
wretched shivering army of clerks and shopwalkers, who in some ways are
actually worse off than a miner or a dock-hand, think of themselves as
proletarians? A proletarian--so they have been taught to think--means a
man without a collar. So that when you try to move them by talking about
'class war', you only succeed in scaring them; they forget their incomes
and remember their accents, and fly to the defence of the class that is
exploiting them.
Socialists have a big job ahead of them here. They have got to
demonstrate, beyond possibility of doubt, just where the line of
cleavage between exploiter and exploited comes. Once again it is a
question of sticking to essentials; and the essential point here is that
all people with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought
to be fighting on the same side. Probably we could do with a little less
talk about' capitalist' and 'proletarian' and a little more about the
robbers and the robbed. But at any rate we must drop that misleading
habit of pretending that the only proletarians are manual labourers. It
has got to be brought home to the clerk, the engineer, the commercial
traveller, the middle-class man who has 'come down in the world', the
village grocer, the lower-grade civil servant, and all other doubtful
cases that they are the proletariat, and that Socialism means a fair
deal for them as well as for the navvy and the factory-hand. They must
not be allowed to think that the battle is between those who pronounce
their aitches and those who don't; for if they think that, they will
join in on the side of the aitches.
I am implying that different classes must be persuaded to act together
without, for the moment, being asked to drop their class-differences.
And that sounds dangerous. It sounds rather too like the Duke of York's
summer camp and that dismal line of talk about class-cooperation and
putting our shoulders to the wheel, which is eyewash or Fascism, or
both. There can be no cooperation between classes whose real interests
are opposed. The capitalist cannot cooperate with the proletarian. The
cat cannot cooperate with the mouse; and if the cat does suggest
cooperation and the mouse is fool enough to agree, in a very little
while the mouse will be disappearing down the cat's throat. But it is
always possible to cooperate so long as it is upon a basis of common
interests. The people who have got to act together are all those who
cringe to the boss and all those who shudder when they think of the
rent. This means that the small-holder has got to ally himself with the
factory-hand, the typist with the coal-miner, the schoolmaster with the
garage mechanic. There is some hope of getting them to do so if they can
be made to understand where their interest lies. But this will not
happen if their social prejudices, which in some of them are at least as
strong as any economic consideration, arc needlessly irritated. There
is, after all, a real difference of manners and traditions between a
bank clerk and a dock labourer, and the bank clerk's feeling of
superiority is very deeply rooted. Later on he will have to get rid of
it, but this is not a good moment for asking him to do so. Therefore it
would be a very great advantage if that rather meaningless and
mechanical bourgeois-baiting, which is a part of nearly all Socialist
propaganda, could be dropped for the time being. Throughout left-wing
thought and writing--and the whole way through it, from the leading
articles in the _Daily Worker_ to the comic columns in the _News
Chronicle_--there runs an anti-genteel tradition, a persistent and often
very stupid gibing at genteel mannerisms and genteel loyalties (or, in
Communist jargon, 'bourgeois values'). It is largely hum-bug, coming as
it does from bourgeois-baiters who are bourgeois themselves, but it does
great harm, because it allows a minor issue to block a major one. It
directs attention away from the central fact that poverty is poverty,
whether the tool you work with is a pick-axe or a fountain-pen.
Once again, here am I, with my middle-class origins and my income of
about three pounds a week from all sources. For what I am worth it would
be better to get me in on the Socialist side than to turn me into a
Fascist. But if you are constantly bullying me about my 'bourgeois
ideology', if you give me to understand that in some subtle way I. am an
inferior person because I have never worked with my hands, you will only
succeed in antagonizing me. For you are telling me either that I am
inherently useless or that I ought to alter myself in some way that is
beyond my power. I cannot proletarianize my accent or certain of my
tastes and beliefs, and I would not if I could. Why should I? I don't
ask anybody else to speak my dialect; why should anybody else ask me to
speak his? It would be far better to take those miserable class-stigmata
for granted and emphasize them as little as possible. They are
comparable to a race-difference, and experience shows that one can
cooperate with foreigners, even with foreigners whom one dislikes, when
it is really necessary. Economically, I am in the same boat with the
miner, the navvy, and the farm-hand; remind me of that and I will fight
at their side. But culturally I am different from the miner, the navvy,
and the farm-hand: lay the emphasis on that and you may arm me against
them. If I were a solitary anomaly I should not matter, but what is true
of myself is true of countless others. Every bank clerk dreaming of the
sack, every shop-keeper teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, is in
essentially the same position. These are the sinking middle class, and
most of them are clinging to their gentility under the impression that
it keeps them afloat. It is not good policy to start by telling them to
throw away the life-belt. There is a quite obvious danger that in the
next few years large sections of the middle class will make a sudden and
violent swing to the Right. In doing so they may become formidable. The
weakness of the middle class hitherto has lain in the fact that they
have never learned to combine; but if you frighten them into combining
_against_ you, you may find that you have raised up a devil. We had a
brief glimpse of this possibility in the General Strike.
To sum up: There is no chance of righting the conditions I described in
the earlier chapters of this book, or of saving England from Fascism,
unless we can bring an effective Socialist party into existence. It will
have to be a party with genuinely revolutionary intentions, and it will
have to be numerically strong enough to act. We can only get it if we
offer an objective which fairly ordinary people will recognize as
desirable. Beyond all else, therefore, we need intelligent propaganda.
Less about 'class consciousness', 'expropriation of the expropriators',
'bourgeois ideology', and 'proletarian solidarity', not to mention the
sacred sisters, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; and more about
justice, liberty, and the plight of the unemployed. And less about
mechanical progress, tractors, the Dnieper dam, and the latest
salmon-canning factory in Moscow; that kind of thing is not an integral
part of Socialist doctrine, and it drives away many people whom the
Socialist cause needs, including most of those who can hold a pen. All
that is needed is to hammer two facts home into the public
consciousness. One, that the interests of all exploited people are the
same; the other, that Socialism is compatible with common decency.
As for the terribly difficult issue of class-distinctions, the only
possible policy for the moment is to go easy and not frighten more
people than can be helped. And above all, no more of those
muscular-curate efforts at class-breaking. If you belong to the
bourgeoisie, don't be too eager to bound forward and embrace your
proletarian brothers; they may not like it, and if they show that they
don't like it you will probably find that your class-prejudices are not
so dead as you imagined. And if you belong to the proletariat, by birth
or in the sight of God, don't sneer too automatically at the Old School
Tie; it covers loyalties which can be useful to you if you know how to
handle them.
Yet I believe there is some hope that when Socialism is a living issue,
a thing that large numbers of Englishmen genuinely care about, the
class-difficulty may solve itself more rapidly than now seems thinkable.
In the next few years we shall either get that effective Socialist party
that we need, or we shall not get it. If we do not get it, then Fascism
is coming; probably a slimy Anglicized form of Fascism, with cultured
policemen instead of Nazi gorillas and the lion and the unicorn instead
of the swastika. But if we do get it there will be a struggle,
conceivably a physical one, for our plutocracy will not sit quiet under
a genuinely revolutionary government. And when the widely separate
classes who, necessarily, would form any real Socialist party have
fought side by side, they may feel differently about one another. And
then perhaps this misery of class-prejudice will fade away, and we of
the sinking middle class--the private schoolmaster, the half-starved
free-lance journalist, the colonel's spinster daughter with £75 a year,
the jobless Cambridge graduate, the ship's officer without a ship, the
clerks, the civil servants, the commercial travellers, and the
thrice-bankrupt drapers in the country towns--may sink without further
struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we
get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we
have nothing to lose but our aitches.
THE END